Shrouds of Darkness

by Brock Deskins

  “I thought we were supposed to be protected!” one of the thugs shouts at the figure.

  Another one pipes in, “I say we just go kill this mother fucker and be done with it! It’s one guy.”

  “You didn’t meet him, Dirk. That guy is not playing around and I for one don’t ever want to meet him again.”

  Oh, Mikey, you poor dumb son of a bitch. You really should have stayed home tonight.

  “That’s because you’re a pussy, Mikey. You were a pussy in life and you’re a pussy in death,” Dirk shoots back with obvious derision.

  “Look,” the masked figure interrupted with a whisper, “Malone will be dealt with, but not yet and certainly not by the likes of you.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do? Just wait for him to hunt us all down one by one?”

  “The situation is being dealt with as we speak. There are greater things at work here and greater people at risk right now than you. That loose end is being taken care of right now. Then we will deal with Leo Malone. Until then, find a deep hole and hide in it until you are called.”

  I don’t know what loose end the masked man is talking about, but since I am here I doubt he means me. Most likely, they are covering up some key piece of evidence like the fact that the Cure apparently walked out of Vincent’s secure laboratory. Whatever it is, there is nothing I can do about it right now and it looks like my man in the mask is about to leave.

  Pulling out a remote, I trigger the three small explosives attached to the door. They are too small to do any real damage but that isn’t the intent. I want it to sound like someone trying to kick the door down just to get everyone’s attention pointed that direction and it works. Knives and guns are pulled out and pointed at the door as they all slowly stalk forward, huddling closer together as they do so.

  I pull out all my triple whammies and hurl them through the small skylight so fast that all four are in the air before the first one ever touched the ground. I then sprint across the roof and leap into the air as my grenades explode, filling the room with thick white smoke, concussive blasts, and flesh-rending shrapnel.

  At the apex of my leap, I trigger the ring of explosives on the rooftop, creating a perfect hole ten feet across like a giant cookie cutter. Gravity pulls me through the opening along with a slab of concrete the size of a large kitchen table, which I ride down like a surfboard right into the middle of shear chaos and pandemonium.

  A gory, red spray like a stomped on packet of ketchup spurts out from beneath the slab upon reaching the ground, indicating that it landed on one of the slower, less fortunate vampires. I hope it is the leader. I do not have time to think about that just now. With my blade in my right hand and Shalonda in my left, I begin dealing out death to everything in my sight.

  The smoke is thick enough that it makes it difficult to distinguish friend from foe unless you are within a few feet of them. This gives me a significant advantage since I have no friends here.

  I land hard, absorbing much of the impact by flexing my knees and rolling towards the nearest vampire. I lash out with my sword even before I stand up, taking out one of the vampire’s legs just above the knee. A lightning-fast strike as I spring to my feet takes his head off as he meets me half way in his fall to the floor.

  A pistol barks from about ten feet away and I feel a bullet tug at the flap of my jacket. I point my hand canon directly at the muzzle flash and squeeze off a round. I am already moving, not waiting to see if I scored a hit, but the scream from that direction tells me my aim was true.

  Panicked voices ring out across warehouse as the rogues try to pick out their friends and create some kind of concerted defense. There is no way I am going to let up enough for that to happen.

  More screams echo across the vast chamber. These of pain, most of which I quickly silence as I dance through the thick smoke, slashing and shooting at anything that moves. True panic is starting to set in and the vampires begin firing wildly into the thick, pervasive smoke without regard to friend or foe. Curses of pain reply to several of the shots, which allow me to home in on my prey.

  I can just barely make out the three forms running for the trapped door. I throw myself to the ground right as twenty pounds of high explosives and ball bearings go off, blasting and shredding all three fleeing vampires into something barely recognizable.

  I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and bring my sword up just in time to block a machete aimed for my neck. I force the lethal weapon wide and bring my own blade back in a swift slice, disemboweling its wielder. My equally fast return stroke succeeds in taking off my attacker’s head where his had failed.

  I feel the bullets slam into me the same instant I hear the shots. Round after round punishes me even through my jacket as the shooter squeezes off his entire clip in mere seconds. A few of the wild shots find vulnerable spots in my Miguel Caballero jacket and manage to punch through into the flesh beneath. One even strikes my exposed lower left leg and staggers me.

  The shooter is a middle-aged Latino that runs out of bullets less than ten feet away from me. I swing Shalonda around and squeeze off a round that strikes him dead in the chest, making a hole big enough to see through. My second shot removes the greater portion of his skull.

  The leader of this meeting of morons must have been counting my shots because the instant I fire off my fifth round he comes flying out of nowhere, sword leading. The attack is swift and well timed. I am barely able to block it, but the force of the strike still sends me sprawling. I roll with the impact and swiftly regain my feet just in time to fend off a flurry of the vampire’s pressing attacks.

  I quickly conclude that my attacker’s skill is not on par with my own. It takes me only a moment to find my own rhythm, and once I am set into my own attack routine, I quickly put him on the defensive.

  I alternate my strikes from high to low, creating a pattern that even an amateur should quickly recognize. I pick my timing and make a feint. My foe anticipates my next strike based upon my previous pattern and leaves himself open. My slashing blow cuts a deep line through his heavy leather coat and the softer tissue beneath. Dark blood wells out from the wound and he takes several retreating steps backward, clasping a hand over the gruesome but nonlethal wound.

  Possibly taking a page from my own playbook, he reaches into a pocket and tosses a small flash grenade at my feet. I leap away as it explodes and start to pursue him as he runs as swiftly as he can out of the massive hole my satchel bomb made, but two lesser vampires foolishly seek to impede my progress.

  I leap and turn a somersault over the head of the leading vampire. I come down between them, landing with a two-handed downward stroke that splits the trailing vamp from crown to collar. I instantly wrench my sword free, spin, and thrust it into the base of other vamp’s neck before he can even turn around. Another slash and I finish the job.

  I want to chase after the masked man but he has too much of a head start and I can already hear sirens in the distance. Explosions tend to bring the cops pretty fast. A low moaning catches my attention as I survey the carnage around me.

  “You should have stayed home, Mikey,” I tell the young vampire as I stand over him.

  “Please, please don’t kill me. I’ll talk. Whatever you want,” he pleads.

  “Can you tell me who the guy in the mask is?”

  “No, but I can find out. I swear I will.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I already know who it is.”

  “Please, I am just following orders! I have nothing against you!”

  “That defense was over-used in the Nuremberg trials. It didn’t work for them either.”

  “What?”

  “I weep for our education system. I let you off once. That was like a coupon—limit one per customer,” I inform him then relieve him of the burden of a continued existence.

  I am able to leap high enough to grab a hanging steel rafter then bound through the hole I made in the roof to recover my bag of goodies. I drop back down through the hol
e and quickly pile up all the bodies before setting off three thermal grenades, also bearing my personal customization. They burn hot but create more fire by adding several ounces of fuel gel to the can.

  Even if I trusted the cleanup crew, which I don’t since they too are part of the Sheriff corps, there simply is not enough time for them to get here so I do my best to destroy as much of the evidence as I can.

  I want to head straight home but I need to feed. I spent a lot of energy in that fight and I’m not walking away unwounded. At least three bullets found their way to my softer bits and a couple of slashes have drawn blood, but they have already closed up. If I have to fight some Sheriffs, I need to stay on top my game and that means a full feeding.

  My old Yamaha gets me across town in short order without breaking any major traffic laws. The last thing I need is to be stopped tonight. I also do not want to do the deed anywhere near the battle so I ride to the east side and find a bum near JFK. I prefer criminals when I have to take a life but time is not a luxury I have just now and besides, no one will miss one more of New York’s fifty thousand or so homeless people.

  The battle is an hour or more in the past by the time I get home. I key my alarm system and am just about to open the door when I hear a sound and catch a strange scent from inside. As quietly as only a vampire can achieve, I ascend the steel stairs to my office and slip through the upstairs door. I jump from the upper landing to the steel beams that make up the structural support of the roof.

  My keen eyesight easily picks out my intruder from the surrounding darkness as he crosses directly below me. I should cut him in half but I want to find out how he got past my security system first.

  I drop from my perch, land directly in front of him, lift him an arm’s length off the ground, and slam him against a support beam.

  “What the hell are you doing in my house, Marvin?” I snarl in unfeigned fury.

  Marvin tries to respond but can only clutch at his throat and mimic a landed fish due to inhaling whatever it is he was eating. I watch him for a moment, curious to see what shades of color a suffocating black kid turns. Seeing that it’s not as entertaining as watching a white guy choke, and still needing him to do some work for me, I punch him hard in stomach with my free hand then drop him to the floor as the chunk of food becomes a projectile.

  Marvin is still failing to take in air since I just knocked out whatever wind he had in his lungs, so I lift him by his arms then make him touch his toes. I do this a few times and he begins to breathe again.

  “Oh shit, Leo, you almost killed me,” he gasps out. “Why’d you have to do that?”

  “Why are you in my house? And how did you even find it?” I demand back.

  It’s not as if I advertise my services in the yellow pages. You have to know people to find me.

  “I found it by hacking the police records. They really don’t like you. That Castillo woman really has a hard on for you. She put all kinds of disparaging remarks in your file. Oh my God, I can’t believe you almost killed me.”

  “The night’s still young. Why are you here?”

  “Well, I figured that you might be calling me and that it could be a late night so I went out to that twenty-four hour pizza joint nearby. Oh, you want some pizza? I looked in your fridge and saw that you have no food in this place. It’s a good thing I brought my pizza with me.”

  “You looked in my refrigerator?” I ask, concerned that Marvin may have just outlived his usefulness.

  “Yeah. Why do you have blood in your fridge, man?”

  “I have a medical condition,” I tell him. “So you got pizza and decided you would come over and share it with me?”

  “No, it was because of the dudes in my apartment!”

  “Who was in your apartment?”

  “I don’t know. I was coming up with my pizza and saw my door open so I peeked in and saw these dudes tearing up my stuff. So I snapped a pic with my phone and got my black ass out of there.”

  “You got a picture?”

  “Yeah, man,” Marvin replies excitedly and hands me his phone. “Check that shit out! I don’t know if they’re feds or mafia or what, but when I put this on Facebook, my street cred is going to go through the roof, boy!”

  I study the picture but I don’t recognize anyone in the room. One is wearing a long, black coat but his back is to me, but I bet money it is a Sheriff with some of his lackeys.

  “If I hadn’t gone out for pizza those guys would have found me and busted me up just like my stuff. Do you realize the irony here?” Marvin continues. “The very same pizza that saved my life back at my apartment damned near killed me in yours. I’m not superstitious or nothing, but that’s gotta be a bad omen or something.”

  I delete the picture and hand the phone back to Marvin.

  “Aw, man, why’d you do that?” Marvin complains loudly.

  “This is not a game, Marvin, and posting stuff like that is only going to draw more attention. Now how did you get in here?”

  “Oh that was easy. Your alarm system is made by LaRoche Security Corporation and it still has the old software. I can’t believe it wasn’t updated after that huge blow up and class action lawsuit two years ago.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you taking about Percy LaRoche’s firm?”

  “Yeah. Why, do you know him?”

  “He’s kind of a friend of mine.”

  Marvin looks surprised and exclaims, “Damn, how can you roll with rich cats like that and live in a shit hole like this? There are Al-Qaeda terrorists living in caves that would consider this place primitive.”

  “What about this lawsuit?” I ask, ignoring his disparaging remark about my humble abode.

  “There was a major flaw in his encryption and core coding. I bunch of Chinese hackers got into several DOD databases and corporate file servers. He lost his ass in court along with most of his contracts. They had to downsize like ninety percent of the company just to keep it limping along—corporate life support.”

  “Hm, I can see why he is so intent on getting that city-wide security camera contract,” I muse aloud.

  “So if you want me to keep working on that stuff, you need to set me up here.”

  “Here? Why do you have to stay here?” I ask, not liking the prospect in the least.

  “One, I got nowhere else to go. Two, if bad-ass thugs want me dead I need somewhere secure and this place is like Fort Knox—if Fort Knox had a shitty alarm system.”

  I cannot deny his logic—no matter how irrational I want to be right now. “Fine, but you fix my alarm and if you think I made for a hostile work environment before, get on my nerves here and you will see hostility of a biblical level. What do you need to start working again?”

  “Well I can see this is going to be just a joy. A lamp would be a good start. It’s darker than a BMA after party in here. I also need a laptop, a server tower running dual Xeon processors, a hundred and twenty-eight gigabytes of ram, and five two-terabyte hard drives in a RAID configuration. And internet, really, really fast internet.”

  Marvin is already giving me a headache. “Make a list. I need to go make a call.”

  “About that blood in the refrigerator,” Marvin calls out at me as walk away. “You’re not like some crazy Jeffery Dahmer guy that’s gonna rape me, kill me, and eat me are you—or any variation thereof?”

  “Not exactly,” I answer as I walk out.

  “What you mean not exactly? What part is not exactly—the killing part or raping part? I gotta tell you, I am not cool with either of those. Leo? Leo!” I hear Marvin drop to his knees and start praying as I step out to grab my bike. “Please, black Jesus, watch over this young fool and protect him from crazy-ass white people, amen.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Whenever I need something quick, I call Yuri and that is what I am doing now. “Yuri, it’s Leo. I need some stuff.

  “What de fock is a Xeon processor?” Yuri asks as I read off Marvin’s list to him. “It sounds like something f
rom Star Trek”

  “I honestly don’t know. I also need an internet connection using multi-mode fiber optic cable to the ISP and I don’t know what that means either but apparently it is important.”

  “I’m kingpin, not focking cable provider! You think I am Comcast or AT&T or something? Is this going to get my accountant back?”

  “It’s crucial in finding Martin.”

  Yuri blows out a long breath that makes his lips flap. “Ok, I have guy. I send him over right now to do cable. I get you computers in morning.”

  “Thanks, Yuri.”

  “Leo, strange things are happening in my town. What you know about these strange things?”

  “I’m not sure, Yuri. Just watch out for yourself.”

  Yuri’s silence as he hangs up tells me that he thinks I am not being entirely honest with him. I hate to lie, Yuri is one of the few people I respect and almost like, but there are some things I simply can’t share unless absolutely necessary.

  I step back inside. Marvin is sitting in my chair apparently surfing the internet on his over-sized smart phone and eating pizza.

  “How far have you gotten on cracking Vtech’s systems?” I ask him as I rudely grab his arm, propel him out of my chair, and sit down.

  Marvin glares at me as he rubs his abused arm and grabs a chair from my small dining table. “Hostile work environment, Leo, remember?”

  “Beating you to death with your own arms, remember?” I counter.

  The combined night’s revelations are putting me in a bad mood and Marvin provides a great outlet.

  “I got into the onsite system and found the security logs. There is no indication of anyone forcefully entering the lab and no record of anyone touching the samples you asked about in over five years other than standard monthly security checks. I decided to dig deeper into the files themselves and ran cyclical redundancy checks on every log file starting from today and working my way back.”

  “English, Marvin,” I tell him.

  “You want me to dumb it down?”