She began working from memory, judging where the pavement should be in relation to the security gate she had just stepped through. Even so, it came as a surprise when her left foot finally stepped off the submerged curb and freezing water rose another six inches or so up her leg. "Ugh!" she spat, stepping fully into the water, shocked at the power she felt pushing against her as the water swept by. Moving across the road as quickly as she could, legs sloshing through the water, Birdy located the opposite sidewalk, then headed up a short way to the gully entrance.
At the farthest end of the gully, lights from the cop cars still danced their silent tango with the darkness. Birdy followed the same route she had taken earlier, sticking to the shadows, but this time she was accompanied by a new companion: fear. It burned in her mind, turning every shadow, every sound, into a vampire. She tried to manage her breathing but the farther along the gully she got, the more her anxiety grew.
Birdy stopped a few feet from the police car that was parked closest to the gully. She breathed in three deep lungfuls of air, while she tried to slow the frantic beating of her heart. Her body temperature was dropping quickly, her hands were already shaking with the cold and she had to fight the urge to throw her arms around herself as the cold bit into her with every snarling gust of wind.
Keep moving, Birdy, she heard Bryanna, her instructor, tell her. Keep the blood pumping fast and your body will look after you.
The door to the closest cop car was still open. Birdy ran at a crouch to it and slipped into the driver's seat. The leather gave off what sounded like the grossest fart she had ever heard as her wet clothes scooted across it and a little giggle escaped her lips despite the tension she still felt.
The interior of the cop car was a mess of computer screens, knobs and switches, none of which she knew how to use. A thick line of congealed blood was splashed across one computer screen in the center console. Birdy leaned to the right and quickly scanned the steering column until she found the ignition switch. She frowned, there was no key. There must be some kind of switch that allowed the emergency lights to run even if the engine was off. What if all the cars are like this one? she thought. Then what do I do? She pushed the thought from her mind, slid out of the driver's seat and crouched for a moment on the pavement as she assessed which of the other cars was closest.
She decided on the one about forty feet ahead of her. It was parked in the opposite direction to the cop car she was sheltering in, at a forty-five-degree angle to the curb, its hood pointing at the center of the road. That meant the driver's door was on the opposite side to this one, away from the sidewalk, facing a tall privet hedge emerging out of the shadows.
She took off running toward the car before she could change her mind. Her feet slipped halfway across the road, her shoes losing all traction. She tried to regain her balance but managed only to fall face first into the water covering the road. She was now thoroughly soaked through, and as she pushed herself back to her feet, spitting out dirty water, she saw she had badly skinned the palm of her left hand when she hit the concrete. She winced as she pulled a couple of pieces of gravel from the meat of her hand, the blood turning pink as the rain diluted it and washed it down her fingers. She sniffed back a couple of tears. It hurt. There would be time to deal with it once Tyreese and the detective were in the car with her, she told herself. Focus.
She was a little more careful now, walking rather than trying to run. When she got to the hood of the cop car she stopped and stared deep into the shadows that lay between it and the hedgerow that acted as a perimeter fence for the looming apartment building beyond. Stare as much as she liked, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles were never going to allow her eyes time to acclimate. She had to move. Now.
Birdy jogged around the front of the police cruiser. The driver's door was closed. She grasped the cold door handle and pulled it open. The interior light came on. She didn't bother getting into the seat this time, instead she placed her hands flat on the seat and leaned in, keeping her feet outside the car.
The key was missing from this car too. "Fuck!" she said loudly, then unconsciously covered her mouth as she felt her face flush at the profanity. Her mother would have slapped her upside the head if she had heard her curse like that.
"Hey! Little girl. What are you doing?"
Birdy screamed and jumped at the sound of a man's voice. Her head collided with the car's roof and she tumbled into the driver's seat. Instinctively, she reached for the door and pulled it shut behind her. She flipped herself around and, all flailing legs and arms, pushed herself across the center console into the shotgun seat until her back was up against the cold metal of the passenger door. To Birdy, her breathing sounded like one of those old-timey steam trains, coming out in rapid, short chuffs. Her hands gripped the leather of the seat as she tried to find some way to make herself even smaller. Through the windshield she could just barely make out the shadowy outline of a figure, a little lighter than the darkness that surrounded it, but still too vague for her to identify exactly who it was.
The shape moved in closer and Birdy recognized the uniform of a mailman. She exhaled a lungful of air and felt her body relax a little. It was a mailman! He was standing just on the other side of the passenger door, his upper torso and face obscured by the roof of the car.
"You know, it's not safe for a kid like you to be out on the streets alone," the mailman said, his voice rumbling, so low it was almost a growl. She heard the sound of his hands pressing against the roof of the cruiser as he leaned his body against it. "Come on out of there, I'll take you somewhere safe."
Birdy couldn't identify what it was exactly, but this did not feel right at all. Why was this stranger just standing there in the dark? Why not come down into the meager light cast by the interior bulbs of the car? And why was he standing so his upper torso was obscured, almost as though he did not want to be seen?
"I... I... don't..." Birdy stumbled over her words, looking to buy herself a little time as she looked frantically around the interior of the police cruiser for something that she might be able to use as a weapon.
A hard rapping on the glass of the rear driver's-side window made Birdy jump. This time she screamed so loudly she thought she might just pee her pants. She levitated from the seat. An involuntary whimper escaped from between her lips as she saw a pair of yellow eyes staring at her through the window.
The eyes belonged to a young woman, maybe just a couple of years older than Birdy. She was crouched at the rear window, staring in at Birdy. The girl's lips were smeared with dried blood that stretched up to both her cheeks. The girl smiled at Birdy. Not a good smile—more like the smile of a fox that has a rabbit cornered in its burrow with no way out. The vampire's lips pulled back, exposing black fangs. She made a slow over-exaggerated snapping bite at the window, both sets of fangs cracking together like metallic jaws. Then she smiled, lasciviously.
"Come on out, come on out, come on out and play with us," the girl crooned in a childlike singsong voice. In a single blur of motion, she vaulted from beside the passenger window onto the hood of the car. She landed with a barely perceptible tremble of the vehicle as though she weighed little more than a feather.
The rain pummeled the girl, her close-cut afro glistened with collected droplets of water. Her clothes, torn in multiple places across her chest and arms hung in tatters, exposing the pallid skin beneath. The faint lines of what looked like half-healed welts ran down her chest, matching the tears in her shirt. On the girl's neck Birdy could see two puncture marks, puckered and angry looking.
Birdy glanced across the interior of the cruiser toward the driver's side window. The mailman was peering in through the window. Birdy guessed he was in his early thirties, his shoulder-length blond hair matched the goatee outlining his lower jaw. He would have been cute when he was alive, Birdy thought, but not now. Not at all now. The two hot coals that were his eyes watched her through the glass with a coldness that was the opposite of the creature that s
at on the hood of the vehicle. This one was cruel, Birdy decided. This one would hurt her, would want to make her suffer.
The mailman reached for the door handle.
Birdy exploded across the driver's seat and pushed the door lock just as she heard the vampire's fingers touch the handle. She flipped around and made sure the passenger door was locked too.
"Leave me alone!" she screamed, as loud as she could, her voice screechy and high with panic. Frantically she ran options through her mind: she was stuck in here with no way to start the cop car and no way to get past the two vampires that waited for her outside. She checked the steering column again but the ignition was still empty. She looked on the floor mat in case the keys had maybe fallen there, pulled down the visor, checked in the center console but found nothing. And there wasn't anything in the car she could use for a weapon, not even a flashlight.
She was trapped.
Birdy's head spun to the driver's side window at the sound of fingernails drumming against the glass. The blond vampire's face was pressed close to it, smiling a terrible smile. His fangs, barely hidden behind his lips, flashed at her when he spoke. "Come on out, little girl. We'll make it fast. Cross my heart and hope you die." He grinned at her hungrily but when Birdy did not comply, he slammed a fist against the window and yelled, "Open the fucking door!"
The female vampire moved off the hood. She stood outside the passenger door, her long fingernails tapping against the glass. Her jaw had distended three inches, the skin of her cheeks stretching almost to the point of breaking. Black drool dripped from the corner of her mouth as she slowly opened and closed her mouth, her tongue flicking in and out between her lips. The vampire drew her distended tongue slowly up the glass of the window, leaving a trail of dark saliva behind.
Birdy screamed as the driver's side window suddenly exploded, showering her with pieces of glass. Wind and rain engulfed the interior of the cop car, momentarily blinding her as she tried to clamber into the back seat, but a security screen separating the rear of the car from the front stopped her.
The blond vampire lunged through the shattered window, grabbing at Birdy as she tried to make herself as small as possible.
Birdy screamed again as she felt the mailman's hand close like a snare around her ankle. She twisted and saw his torso halfway through the broken window, his right hand locked around her ankle, jaw agape, eyes wild with furious anticipation.
In her peripheral vision, Birdy saw the female vampire disappear as she jumped onto the roof of the car then down behind the blond cop. The girl tried to force herself through the window too, blood lust driving her to claw at the other vampire in her desire to reach Birdy. The blond vampire turned slightly, opened his jaws wide then snapped them down hard on the female vampire's face, tearing away a chunk of flesh that he swallowed in two quick gulps like a hungry lizard. The girl screamed in pain, fluid—the same viscous shit Birdy had seen covering Julio in the apartment—spurted from the wound in her face. She flung her hands to the wound, screamed in outrage, and vanished below the door panel, mewling like a scolded child. Birdy could hear her cries of pain even above the roar of the storm.
Before the blond vampire's attention could return to her, Birdy pulled back her free leg and drove her foot hard into the creature's jaw. The vampire's head juddered at the impact, but besides that, all Birdy's kick did was draw the monster's full attention back to her. It reached another hand into the car, grabbed Birdy's other ankle and began pulling her out of the car through the window.
Birdy's scream of terror was cut short by a bleat of pain as her head cracked hard against the car's center console. Her hands blindly felt for anything that she could hold onto, but the rain had already soaked the interior of the car and her fingers slipped off every surface as the vampire dragged her inch by inch out of the vehicle.
Her hands closed around the edge of the car's window frame. She locked her fingers on it for a second and tried with all her rapidly dwindling strength to pull free of the monster's grip. But the vampire seemed indefatigable, and with a violent tug he wrenched her free of the door.
Birdy tried to scream again but pain and fear and panic had her now. A shrill whistling screech was all she managed, her cries caught by the wind and scattered into the night. Her head bumped hard against the door panel and she felt the skin of her left cheek split open, and the warm flow of blood across her face. Then she was completely outside, the rain hammering her body.
If Birdy had hit the ground on any other night than this, she would surely have suffered a concussion at best and at worst a fractured skull, or even death. Tonight the six inches or more of rainwater covering the pavement acted as enough of a cushion that only her breath was knocked from her lungs as she splashed down into the dirty water.
Birdy tried to breathe in but felt water flood her nose and mouth. The acid burn of bile flowed up Birdy's throat as she inhaled the dirty water into her lungs. She coughed, spat, gagged, then threw up over her chest, even as the vampire dragged her toward the waiting shadows of the nearby hedgerow. Through her rain-blurred vision she saw the other vampire, the girl, sitting cross-legged like a child in the water nearby, her hand still clenched to the now-almost-healed wound in her cheek. She stared at Birdy, her youthful face contorted into a strange mixture of desire, hunger, and anger. Whether the last was directed at her or her captor, Birdy did not know. Nor did she care, not anymore.
The girl vampire pushed herself to her feet, her eyes fixed on Birdy with a ravenous stare, drool dripping from her mouth as she edged forward.
They're going to eat me, Birdy realized. But first they were going to make her suffer.
Birdy closed her eyes.
She registered the sound first, a wet thunk, like a bag of flour hitting the ground then she opened her eyes just in time to see the young girl's head spinning through the night toward her. The decapitated head landed with a splash in the water near her, rolled a couple of times, then stopped against the lip of the sidewalk gutter, the lower jaw flopping uselessly back and forth as the water gushed down the road, buffeting the head like it was a soccer ball. The vampire's eyes continued to glow for a second longer, then dimmed and faded to nothing.
The blond vampire dropped Birdy's legs and began to turn at the sound of his comrade's headless body splashing onto the water-covered road. If he had been paying less attention to moving Birdy, he might have had time to deal with the shadowy figure as it rushed at him from the hedgerow. He might even have avoided the ax as it arced through the air, catching what little light there was on the edge of its blade before it sank into the top of his skull and split his head almost in two.
Birdy winced as bloody gore splattered across her face. The blond vampire's body toppled over and splashed to the ground next to her, the ax—she could see it was a bright red fire ax—still lodged in the dead vampire's skull.
Birdy's eyes followed the blurry silhouette of the vampire killer as it moved closer to her, gradually materializing into the form of a large black woman with the kindest face Birdy thought she'd ever seen. The woman knelt next to her and gently reached out a hand to touch Birdy's bleeding cheek.
The last thing Birdy registered before she lost consciousness was the woman's voice, "Genie's got you now, baby girl. And she ain't gonna let nothing happen to you."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Birdy drifted on the wind of the night.
At least, that's what it felt like to her; floating through the rain and the darkness. She felt sick, smelled vomit; hers probably, but she could not be certain. She tasted its acid burn in her mouth and down the back of her throat. And her head hurt. The further she rose toward full consciousness the more pain she became aware of, so she fought consciousness for a while, but its pull became too strong, inexorably dragging her back toward reality.
Birdy opened her eyes. She blinked away the raindrops that immediately ran into them. Her head swam almost as much as her vision but after a few seconds of disorientation it clea
red enough that she was able to see the face of a woman... the woman with the ax, she realized as her memory returned. She was in the woman's arms, being carried... where? Panic swept through her, and she began to struggle weakly.
"Hey now, quit that," the woman whispered. "You trying to get us both killed?"
Birdy continued to try and free herself from the woman's grasp. "Put me down," she croaked.
"I said quit it, or by God I'll leave you right here for them monsters to get you, you hear me?"
Birdy stopped struggling.
"That's better. I ain't gonna hurt you. Look..." The woman nodded ahead of them. Birdy allowed her eyes to follow the direction of the woman's nod. Through the curtain of rain, its emergency lights flashing so brightly it felt like knives plunging into her skull, Birdy saw the big SWAT truck parked in front of the apartment entrance. She tilted her head in the opposite direction and saw the police cruiser she'd been trapped in about thirty feet behind them, the outlines of the two vampires' bodies sprawled next to it. The fire ax, she noted, was missing from the head of the blond vampire.
This woman—she had told Birdy her name just before she blacked out... It was... Jenny? No, Genie. That was what the woman had said her name was. Genie. Like the one in Aladdin that lived in a lamp.
She couldn't have been unconscious for too long. Birdy's mind struggled to comprehend what had just happened. This woman had saved her from the two vampires, rescued her from certain death. She remembered that much. If Genie hadn't come along she would have ended up just like her mom. Birdy shivered, not because of how cold the air was, but because the thought of becoming like them was soul freezing.
"Thank you," Birdy mumbled. Her lips felt dry, despite the constant rain.
Genie continued to whisper to the girl in her arms. "You ain't got to thank me for nothing. It's the Christian thing to do. You're pretty banged up, baby girl. But don't worry, Genie's got you. We gonna get you outta here, okay?"
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