Return of the Phoenix - 01

by Heath Stallcup

  Jack swallowed the bite he had been chewing and asked, “And why am I supposed to care?”

  “Ah. Therein lies the true question, doesn’t it?” Rufus sat forward and pulled the chair slightly closer to the bed allowing the candle light to highlight his face more. “You see, it is my sincere hope that once you are fully healed and are capable of leaving here, that you will return to your people and explain what it is really going on out here.”

  Jack stopped eating for a moment and allowed himself the slim hope that he not only would survive being a prisoner of the monsters, but that he would actually be allowed to leave. “You mean to tell me that I’m not a prisoner here?”

  Rufus sat back with a look of shock, and Jack honestly couldn’t tell if it was feigned or real. “Good heavens, man! Why would we have saved your life and risked our own only to keep you a prisoner here? To what end? I’ve told you that we’re vegetarians. We don’t feed on humans. We certainly don’t imprison them. What’s next? You expect me to torture you as well? Perhaps place you on the rack as they did in the medieval days?”

  “Well forgive the shit out of me for thinking that a bloodsucker might want to actually suck my blood…” Jack replied, instantly regretting it.

  Rufus laughed; a deep, hearty laugh that actually brought a careful smile to Jack’s own mouth. “My dear boy, you have a lot to learn. A very lot,” he said, still chuckling, as if there was an inside joke that Jack was unaware of. “Firstly, we are vegetarians. We may be old, but we still remember what it was like to be human. And we cherish life. All life. But human life above all else.” Rufus paused to allow his statement to hit home with Jack. “We have taken a solemn oath to take no human lives in order to sustain our own.” Jack raised his brow again on that one, obviously not believing him.

  Rufus stood up and slowly began pacing the room as he began his tale, “Many, many years ago, I was very close to death. I was born with weak lungs and had many problems as a child. My parents moved me from Britannia to France and from France to many other areas, all in the hopes of either finding a cure or an environ that was more suitable for my breathing. When I was but twenty-three years and approaching my twenty-fourth birthday, I had a series of attacks that left me bedridden. I really wasn’t sure where we were at this time. You see, I had been very ill the previous year and my parents had moved us again. My father owned a large estate in Britain and my mother was a Duchess, so money wasn’t a problem for them. As a last ditch effort, they tried a Romanian doctor, who, I believe, infected me with vampirism.

  “I was never actually bitten by a vampire, nor was I drained, or seduced, or…well, whatever it is that you are taught. No, I was actually purposely injected by a so-called physician selling my parents on the hope of life.” Rufus paused in his pacing and turned to face Jack, his head bowed, and Jack saw the pain in his eyes. “The first nights were horrible. The nightmares, the pain, the thirst…more than I could bear. By the time it had taken hold fully, I was stronger and completely out of my mind with hunger. I tore through my restraints and murdered my parents,” he stated softly.

  Rufus sat back down and cleared his throat. “For many years afterward, I ran from what and who I was. Eventually, I learned to control many things. My hunger, though, always tore at me. Then I encountered a much older vampire who took my under his wing, so to speak. He taught me that we didn’t need to hunt humans for food, although it took a while to develop the taste. Cattle and other livestock could be substituted, and the vampirism doesn’t transfer to them.

  “With time, we developed ways to bleed a little from the livestock and keep them alive. Much the same as you might ‘milk’ your livestock. Keep the stock alive and simply take what was needed to survive. It sustains us, but we are weaker than our brethren who still feed on humans for sustenance.”

  Jack set his tray aside and tried to get a bit more comfortable. “So why don’t more vampires do this whole ‘vegetarian’ thing like you do?”

  “To them, it is a sign of weakness. It makes you weaker and slower to feed on anything other than humans and to other vampires, it is not only offensive, it is practically heresy,” Rufus replied. “It is the cause of our own civil war.”

  “Civil war?” Jack asked, in disbelief.

  “Yes. You see, there are more and more of us converting to what we call ‘The New Way’ and fewer and fewer of the those who absolutely refute it and demand we convert back to the ‘Old Ways’…the way it was meant to be. It has become the main political point in what has become the Great Vampire Civil War.”

  “Okay. And where exactly do we fit in to this scenario?” Jack asked, not sure he was going to like the answer.

  “That is what I was hoping to speak to you about,” Rufus said as he sat on the edge of the chair. He paused as if gathering his thoughts, choosing his words wisely. “Many of the vampires you and your team have hunted down over the past few years have been ‘Lamia Beastia’ that were set up to appear as Hunters.” Rufus peered into Jack’s eyes to see if he was catching on. “The Hunters are ‘Lamia Humanus’ and they are those who feed on humans. They are cunning, ruthless and vicious in their attacks against both humans and us.”

  “Wait a minute!” Jack interjected. “You mean to tell me that of the two sides of vampires, we’ve only been killing the so-called ‘good guys’? And that you and your goat-suckers are the good guys and we should just leave you the fuck alone?”

  “Well,” Rufus replied, “yes, and no.”

  “What the fuck? I’m supposed to just believe that—”

  “No, please, you must understand something, first,” Rufus stated, putting his hands up to stop Jack’s outburst. “Firstly, yes, you are correct that there are two sides in our civil war. Secondly, you haven’t only been killing our side, but you have been mostly killing only our side because the other side has been laying the proverbial bread crumbs to our doorsteps. And thirdly, there was no way for any of you to know or realize that there were any vampires out there who weren’t a threat to humanity.”

  Jack stared at Rufus for quite some time before simply saying, “Right.”

  “Look, I realize that this is a lot for you to try to take in and understand. And I do understand that you are not yet prepared to believe what I say. I can only hope that as you heal and become more mobile, that I can show you more proof and perhaps convince you that what I say is true.”

  “And if you can’t?” Jack asked.

  Rufus shook his head as he stood and replaced the chair in its original position. “Then, I’m afraid you will leave here and tell your friends that you were saved and given medical treatment by a bunch of crazed vampires who tried like mad to convince you to assist them in their cause. Either way, you will leave here unharmed…as promised.

  “I mean it when I tell you that we mean you no harm, Mr. Thompson. I only wish for you to understand the situation that we are in and the situation that you and your team are making worse for us by killing our kind when the really bad vampires are out there trying to destroy us and using you as their weapon.” With that Rufus turned and left Jack alone in his candlelit room to ponder the possibilities.

  *****

  Senator Franklin put away the summaries of the upcoming bills that would require his vote and pulled his keys from his trouser pocket. Unlocking the lower drawer of his desk, he pulled an old cigar box out and sat it gingerly on his desk. Opening the box, he sifted the contents and ran his fingertips gently across each item, studying them, his heart breaking all over again with loss. He pulled from the box a cell phone and dialed it. Placing the phone to his ear, he listened again to the message that he had long ago memorized, only to hear the voice that he had not heard in years. A lonely tear ran from his eye along the base of his nose to the edge of his lip and he choked back a painful smile. When the message finished playing, he turned the phone off and placed it and the other contents of the cigar box back and locked it away in his drawer.

  The senator sat quietly in his of
fice, staring at the framed picture on his desk, gently rocking in his overstuffed leather chair. His heart slowly hardening once again. His face slowly turning bitter again. Mitchell had to be stopped before it was too late. He had no idea what he was doing and Franklin couldn’t do it without the support of the rest of the oversight committee.

  An assassination was out of the question. They’d simply replace him. The best PI in DC couldn’t find enough information to hang him. His contacts in the FBI and the CIA were trying to dig up more as quietly as they could, but he wasn’t hopeful. He had no contacts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or he’d have called in that marker as well.

  The man would have to be ruined. The Monster Squad would have to be ruined as well. This latest fiasco wasn’t enough to do it and half of the entire team was decimated. What more would it take? The entire base in Oklahoma City leveled to the ground? That wasn’t exactly likely.

  Although Franklin was considered a very powerful man in Washington, in matters like this, his hands were pretty much tied. He was beating his head against a well-liked wall. Well-liked by the people who knew about it and who made things happen.

  Then a creepy smile slowly spread across Senator Franklin’s thin face. What if the Monster Squad and all of their actions were to somehow become public knowledge? he pondered. What if it appeared to be a leak in their own organization, as well?’ He was beginning to like the sounds of this idea. The more he contemplated the idea, the more the idea began to take shape, and the easier it seemed it would be to place all the blame on MS4, use the public pandemonium to his full advantage, and with the blame and responsibility resting fully on Mitchell’s shoulders, use the full force of the senator’s power to shut the squad down for good.

  The problem will be ensuring that whatever is leaked can never be traced back to this office, he thought. Franklin knew he was hardly literate in computers. He could barely check his own e-mail. It was time to hire the best hackers that his barely earned money could buy.

  *****

  Laura had double checked to make sure that Mitchell and Wolf were well occupied studying the new team as they ran through their drills. Wolf oversaw the men’s check-out on the weaponry, and when he felt the men were adequately familiar with the hardware, Mitchell let them loose on live-fire drills. Once the shooting started, Laura slipped out the back and through the dark, unguarded hallways to the holding cell holding the facilities lone prisoner.

  There, in the darkest corner, huddled as though protecting itself from the cold, was the vampire Mitchell had shown the men. Laura squatted next to the cell bars and called to the being that once was a biologist assisting the team. “Evan? Are you still in there?” she asked softly.

  The creature stirred, raising its head. Sunken eyes peered over its arm that was crossed over the legs that it had drawn close to its body. They watched her intently, but she couldn’t tell if there was any recognition behind them.

  She checked the hallway again and then pulled four expired IV bags of human blood from under her shirt and slid them across the floor toward the creature. It didn’t stir. Laura had expected it to attack the bags of blood and devour them, yet when it didn’t move or make any attempts at the blood, she almost started to panic. She knew the blood was to be destroyed and couldn’t stand the thought of Evan being starved because some idiot on the oversight committee wanted to know if the creatures could be starved to death. That thought process made no sense. In order for them to be starved, humans would have to be extinct. Or a vampire sealed up for who knew how long? She truly thought that Franklin was behind the torture, but the rule came down and Evan was placed behind silver-plated bars to be tortured for whatever was left of his natural (or unnatural) life. She hadn’t slept right since.

  “Kill me please,” the voice was soft and dry, almost raspy.

  “Evan!” Laura asked, not sure she even heard him. She stepped closer to the cell. “Please, tell me you’re still in there. Tell me you have control over whatever this is that has you!” she practically sobbed.

  The eyes simply lowered and the creature lowered its head back to its resting position, ignoring her.

  “Evan, wait. I brought you blood. I know it’s not fresh, but it’s human. Not animal blood. The clinic was about to throw it out and I salvaged it for you.” She sounded desperate. “Please, drink it. Regain some of your strength,” she pressed herself against the bars and pleaded with him.

  “To what end?” came the soft still voice again, the head not moving.

  “I don’t know,” she cried. “Just please. At least it’s something. Perhaps I can convince Mitchell to release you and you can carry on your work. Maybe I can get more and at least you won’t have to starve any longer.” Tears were flowing freely down her face now. She lowered her eyes and cried; her body began to rock with the sobbing. She never even sensed him move, but she felt his leathery hand stroke her hair through the silver bars, careful not to touch the metal lest the flesh burn.

  “Don’t cry,” was all he could say.

  She looked up at what was left of him and the only part of him that didn’t look like a monster was his eyes. They were still as blue as she remembered. In his other hand he held the IV bags.

  *****

  “What do you think, Jay?” Mitchell asked as the men ran their drills.

  “I think I’d like some of that go-juice you got them on, that’s what I think,” Wolf replied, still awed at the speed and accuracy of the warriors going through the live-fire drills.

  Mitchell chuckled. “I know. But you also know that without the constant monitoring by our docs and the ongoing regimen, your heart would explode in less than a month. Lisa wouldn’t like that and something tells me she’d have my ass on a platter over it. No matter how good you might think you were feeling prior to that. If it were a one-and-done type of thing, I might would consider it, buddy.”

  Jay nodded, but he was still jealous of the abilities of the squad, and they hadn’t yet reached their full potential. “How long before they’re ready to hit the streets and rid the world of hobgoblins and other creatures of the night?”

  “We’re looking at probably another couple of weeks of intense training,” Mitchell said. “They’re still breaking out of their old training ideas and embracing the single squad ideal.” Mitchell headed up a flight of stairs to a control room with live video feed screens. “In the past we only used Navy SEALs and Army Rangers or Green Berets. This time we’re incorporating Air Force Combat Controllers and an LAPD SWAT sniper as well.”

  “Why break from tradition, Matt?” Jay asked.

  “We’re starting to see a lot more air support in our strikes and the Combat Controllers have more than proved themselves in the operations in the Middle East. Ya know, they were the first in to coordinate air strikes the first time we went over there.”

  “I do now.”

  “Since we’re using more air support, they seemed a natural. And they seem to be mixing in well. They have the hand-to-hand and small arms training that we expected, and they have nerves of steel. A good mix. So far, they’re proving more than capable.” Mitchell seemed quite proud that this group had meshed as well as they had.

  “And to be completely honest, it was Laura’s decision to include them. She hand-selected the entire team,” he stated proudly with a wave of his hand, displaying the wall of monitors showing the helmet cams during the live fire scenarios. “And that little gal from SWAT was one of the first females to ever make it as a SWAT officer. Tough as friggin’ nails, too.”

  A moment later a claxon sounded and a red light went off indicating the end to the timed run. Mitchell escorted Wolf down to the training grounds to get input from the men. Once they were both down on the training floor, the men had already began tearing down the weaponry and cleaning them.

  “What’s your take, boys?” Mitchell asked as he approached them.

  Tracy looked up from the table of weapons with a lopsided grin. “To be honest, sir? I’d li
ke to have one of these little bastards for myself. Hell, I think I could hide one of these P90s in my boxers,” he said with a chuckle.

  Someone else muttered under their breath, “There’d be plenty of room for one.” Although it brought a round of laughs, nobody was man enough to admit who it was.

  Mueller offered constructive input in that he would like to see a both-eyes-open type of scope on top of the P90. Perhaps an Aim point or EOTech and do away with the factory ghost ring sight. Mitchell assured him that once they were familiar with the weaponry, the men would have their choice of optics for the weapons.

  Jacobs asked if the FiveseveN had night-sites available. He didn’t like the answer. The factory did have them available, but they weren’t adjustable. Jay’s company, however, did offer adjustable night sites and he told Matt that if the men wanted them, he could have his smiths expedite as many sets as needed and their smiths could install them without much problem.

  Marshal, Lamb, and Sanchez were all checking out the SCAR 17. They had yet to actually get to use it during the drills since the weapon would be set up primarily as a sniping platform. They were really hoping to convince the colonel to allow them to install the shorter barrel and use it as a CQB weapon as well. Both of the men felt that the weapon could be used as a short range sniping weapon and a close quarter battle rifle effectively if the colonel would give them a chance to play with the platform and prove it. Wolf and Mitchell weren’t sure about it, but both men agreed that if the two snipers were that confident, they would at least give them the opportunity to prove their theory. Sanchez liked it just the way it was.