Since Kawosa wasn’t moving and the Half Breeds were down, Cole checked the phone’s screen. Paige had been trying to reach him. More than likely that was why Kawosa had kept the phone in the first place. “Hello?” Cole said after establishing the connection.
“Where the hell have you been? Why the hell would you pick this of all times to start ignoring that piece of shit phone of yours?”
“There’s my girl,” Cole said with relief.
Prophet had reloaded his pistol and was shifting his aim between all three of the creatures lying on the floor. “Is that Paige?”
Cole nodded.
“You sure about that?”
“Ohhh, yeah,” Cole replied.
“I hear gunshots,” she said. “What’s happening over there? Did you start the raid without me?”
“Had to,” Cole said.
“But I just got into Denver!”
“Did the nymphs charge up again?”
“No, Bob got me on a chartered jet. It’s a long story.”
Even though there was more than enough going on in the immediate vicinity, Cole felt his hackles raise when he heard that name. “Bob Stanze? Officer Bob Stanze from Kansas City?”
“That’s him. He knows some people. I’m not sure if they’re Feds or what, but he says they’re from police departments all over the country.” She paused to take a breath, and no matter what else was going on at that moment, Cole waited for her to finish. “They know about us,” she said. “They know about Skinners and what we do. From what he’s been telling me, they’ve known for a while now.”
“So on top of everything else, we’ve got to deal with some kind of conspiracy?”
“That’s why I’ve been sticking with them,” Paige hissed. Her voice had become louder and scratchier, making Cole certain she was cupping her hand over her phone when she said, “Just tell me you’re getting to those cops the Nymar set up. I don’t know how big this thing is yet, but the last thing we need is more bad blood on our hands where the police are concerned.”
“I’m getting to it.”
“Good. Call when you’ve got something. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
When the connection was cut, Cole felt as if he’d been severed from damn near everything in his world. He wasn’t alone in that stark white building, but he no longer had the guiding force that had gotten him this far. Knowing what needed to be done was one thing. Doing it, no matter what might happen to him along the way, was another.
Prophet grit his teeth and kept his back to a wall as hell spilled into the hallway on the other side of the door in front of him. “All right,” he said. “What’s next?”
“You’re gonna stay here and hack that computer.”
“I don’t know anything about hacking a damn computer!”
“It’s already unlocked,” Cole explained as he waved at the bloodstained terminal. “The screen’s a little gross, but the pass codes have already been put in. Do you know how to go through PC files?”
“Yeah.”
“Then go through as much as you can and look for anything that might be useful. If you find something, print it up or e-mail it to yourself.”
“Won’t that be dangerous?” Prophet asked.
The gunfire had moved into another part of the building. In the time it took for Cole to place his spear into the harness strapped to his back, several voices boomed from the front and back rooms. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying but they had the cadence of authority mixed in with several choppy syllables that could either be “freeze” or “on your knees.”
“I doubt there’ll be anyone left around here to follow up with viruses or backward traces,” Cole explained. “Cobb38 must have security measures in place, so he’ll probably figure out something’s up and send you something to corrupt your system. Just don’t open anything until I can do a sweep of whatever computer you send it to.”
“I meant safe as in me being safe screwing with computer shit while everyone’s trying to kill us!”
“Sounds like cops out there,” Cole said, “Since they’re probably going to be more careful than any of us, you should have enough time to get what you need and get out. There’s gotta be something in there we can use. Addresses, phone numbers, a contact list. A contact list would be great!”
Another eruption of official-sounding voices was washed away in the roar of shotguns. Prophet reflexively covered his head as he approached the computer but stopped short of ducking under the desk. Cole, on the other hand, kept walking toward the hall.
“At least we took out these … whatever the hell they are,” Cole said. Just to make sure, he checked the bodies on the floor. Both of the werewolves were still lying in their pools of blood, but Kawosa was nowhere to be found. He left behind no blood, tracks, or anything more substantial than the memory that he’d been in that room. “Of course,” Cole grunted. “Things aren’t ever that easy.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The building had a simple floor plan with one ring of rooms surrounding a block of larger ones. One large hallway wrapped all the way around, connecting two main entrances, one in front and the other in the back. Rico guessed there was at least one side door but had been too busy getting shot at to find it. The other Amriany came in through the front and fought their way inside, guns blazing to make the biggest spectacle possible. Somewhere along the line Nadya had caught a bullet. Gunari dragged her down the hall by her collar so her legs were splayed out behind them and she was able to keep firing her semiautomatic in controlled bursts.
After regrouping with them, Rico tapped his earpiece and asked, “Cole, where the hell are you?”
“Right behind you.” Sure enough, Cole rounded a corner to find Rico and Drina on opposite sides of the hall with their backs pressed against a soda and snack machine, respectively. Before he could get to Rico’s side, the rest of the Amriany came along to meet them.
“The Nymar retreated into the east side of the building.” Knowing Cole’s lack of an internal compass, Rico pointed down the hall past the vending machines and added, “That way. They drove us back here after we took a few of them down then fell back into that room at the end of the hall. I’m guessing it’s an open space because they’d be crammed in like clowns in a Volkswagen if it was just another closet.
“Did you hit anyone other than Nymar?” Cole asked.
“Nope. Barely slowed down the ones I did hit. Only a few of them twitched at the antidote rounds. The rest’ve been scampering around like rats. Probably just holding us here until their backup arrives.”
Drina pressed a finger to her earpiece and frowned. “Tobar was taken by the police.”
“And that’d be their backup,” Rico grunted.
“Let’s just clean this place out,” Cole said. “I’ve got the best armor, so I’ll draw the aggro.”
“What is he talking about?” Gunari asked as he tightened a length of torn fabric around one of Nadya’s knees. Her leg was soaked in blood that oozed out through her jeans, but she barely acknowledged it with anything more than a sharp breath.
Rico shook his head and chanced a look around the soda machine. “I barely ever know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“Aggro,” Cole said impatiently. “One guy goes in to draw fire and the others circle around to flank the bad guys. Don’t any of you guys ever do any gaming? For the love of God, it’s the twenty-first century!”
The screaming from the front half of the building died down, followed by the occasional crash of a door being kicked in.
“By the way,” Cole said as he gripped his .45 and closed his coat by threading one of the thick wooden slivers that passed for buttons through a rough slit Rico had cut into the leather, “there’s some other shapeshifter running around here. Not a werewolf. Mind controller. Be on the lookout for him.” With that, he set his sights on the doors at the end of the hall and rushed toward them.
There was plenty of noise within the building to mask hi
s footsteps as he jogged toward the door. Although he could wrap his mind around any number of inhuman terrors that might be waiting for him in the next room, he still didn’t know how he was going to deal with the police. Apart from not shooting them, his choices seemed pretty limited. A humorless grin drifted onto his face as he brought his gun up to eye level and extended his other hand toward the door. The way the odds were stacked, he probably wouldn’t need to worry about much of anything beyond the next half hour, so it didn’t make sense to plan much further than that. The pain within his chest tightened as though a length of dental floss was being drawn taut after being wrapped around all of his major organs. The muscles he was about to use all flushed with heat as his throat became drier than the floor of an old kiln. A tickling sensation sprang up near the base of his spine, and he was hungrier than he’d ever been.
Cole meant to shove the door open but wound up knocking it off one of its hinges and leaving it askew in its frame. Compared to the stark lighting of the hallway, the space directly in front of him was a single shadowy mass. Several bare bulbs hung from the ceiling to reveal a loading dock or some sort of industrial storage space. Pallets covered in dusty tarps formed a wall to his left. Two vans were parked to his right with their noses pointed toward a pair of large garage doors covered by steel shutters. The lights hung from the ceiling amid a thick webbing of girders and beams, topped by the slanted roof of the building itself. He took all of this in within his first few steps. That was more than enough time to notice the Nymar that swarmed in on him from all sides like a colony of centipedes.
Since police departments didn’t generally hire from the superhuman wall-crawling labor pool, Cole fired at every overhead Nymar he spotted. One slender figure wrapped its arms around a beam and looked down at him with wide unblinking eyes. Cole aimed carefully and fired again. His shot sparked against the beam but got close enough to shake the Nymar loose. The vampire hit the floor on its back. Now that he was beneath the lights, the solid black hue of its skin melted into thick stripes. Cole meant to hold the Nymar beneath his foot long enough to get to his spear, but his heel dropped heavily onto the Nymar’s upper chest to snap its collarbone with a solid wet crunch.
While he shifted his aim to the shape dropping down to get behind him, he pulled his coat open and reached for the weapon harness. One shot punched through the Nymar’s ribs, the next clipped its ear, and the one after that was a clean miss. The vampire wore only a pair of black pants, keeping as much of its shadowy skin exposed as possible. His bare feet slapped against the concrete floor, putting an extra kick behind the breath he used to spit a wad of venom at Cole’s face.
The toxic substance hit his hand and neck, cooling them on impact and forcing him to look away when the next wave of gunfire erupted. Most of those shots erupted from a Sig Sauer and a FAMAS submachine gun.
“How many times I gotta tell you to stop goin’ for those head shots?” Rico snarled as he moved to Cole’s side. With a few more pulls of his trigger, the big man carved a large and very messy hole through the spitting Nymar’s chest. It fell straight back with cracks forming in its flesh before it hit the floor.
As Rico and Cole moved forward, Drina and Gunari fanned out to either side. Even while hobbling on a wounded leg, Nadya joined her fellow Amriany by finding the first piece of solid cover and running behind it.
“Goddamn Gypsies,” Rico growled as he fired at a shotgun-wielding Nymar that stepped out from behind one of the stacks of pallets. “First chance to hide and they run for it.”
Overhead, electricity crackled through the uppermost fixtures nestled above the beams to bring several rows of fluorescent bulbs to life. A few seconds later the other half of the room was illuminated, exposing the Nymar that were sneaking down from where they’d been hidden.
“I think you can thank the Gypsies for that,” Cole chided.
Rico squeezed off a few quick rounds to put down one long-haired Nymar that stuck her head around the corner. “Don’t call them Gypsies,” he said. “They don’t like that.”
Cole emptied his last few rounds into a group of Nymar gathering near large doors that must have opened onto one of the truck-filled lots outside the building. Even though he could see the reaction of the antidote infused into the bullets on two of the Nymar that were hit, the ones with the Shadow Spore barely flinched. The standard issue vampires staggered away, allowing their enhanced partners to close the distance between themselves and the Skinners.
“Cops are headed your way,” Prophet said through the earpiece.
“Shit,” Cole grunted.
Rico reloaded his Sig Sauer with practiced efficiency, but had given up on trying to take deliberate shots. “I know. I heard.”
“Not that. My phone’s ringing.” After digging out the cell, Cole glanced at the screen. “It’s Paige.”
“Better take it. She’s been known to get snippy if you ignore her calls.”
Even in the middle of a war zone, Cole had to chuckle at that one.
“We’re only about fifteen minutes away,” Paige said. Her voice was straining to be heard over the roar of several loud engines.
“Are you on a helicopter?”
“Yeah. I’m telling you, these guys are serious.”
“Well so are the Nymar,” Cole said as three of the vampires coordinated their efforts to form a quick firing line and unleash a salvo in his direction.
“When I get there, you’re gonna have to trust me,” Paige said.
“What’s the plan?”
“Just follow my lead and trust me. Please, Cole.”
When his .45 ran dry, he holstered the gun and gripped his spear in both hands. “Someone was here impersonating you. Called himself Kawosa or something like that. Ring any bells?”
“Great. Another thing coming after us. Never heard of him.”
“How long before you get here?”
“Shouldn’t be long,” she replied. “Are you going to be okay?”
“As good as always.”
“Just hang in there and—”
“Follow your lead,” Cole interrupted as a pair of Nymar leapt from their positions behind a parked van to bounce off the walls and launch themselves at him. “Got it.” The last syllable was still in his mouth when he held the spear up to block the first incoming Nymar. The vampire’s hair streamed over her shoulders and she bared two sets of fangs at him. Apparently, she wasn’t worried about poisoning him, so she left the curved pair sheathed beneath her gums.
His spear caught her across the chest. Cole took advantage of her momentum by pivoting to send her flailing into a stack of pallets. Still hesitant to use anything without a trigger, Rico blasted another airborne Nymar with a torrent of .45 caliber slugs that sent it bouncing off a cement pillar and to the floor. “Get to the garage doors,” he said while running to finish off the Nymar he’d taken down. “Spread the word to the Amriany.”
Gunari and Drina had moved their fight through the open section of the room. They held their own well enough to force the Nymar to form a small cluster there. Every few seconds the Nymar sent a few out at a time, like larger versions of the tendrils that crept through their own bodies.
Cole rushed at the Nymar he’d bounced off a post, snarling viciously as he impaled the creature at the end of his spear. This wasn’t one of the Nymar infected with the Shadow Spore, which made it easier to find a soft spot with the metal tip of his spear. “Where are the cops?” he asked.
“They’re already here,” she replied. “Are you deaf?”
“I mean the cops you were going to frame us for killing. Where are they?”
“Are you going to … let me go?” she grunted.
“If you tell me quickly, yes.”
“There’s two in one of the offices and more in one of the vans,” she told him. “But you’re too late to do anything about them. They’re dead and one of your weapons is still sticking out of a body. I don’t know what kind of shit you smear all over those sticks, but
I bet it’s real distinctive on any tests the cops might run on the wounds.”
“Where’d you get one of our weapons?”
The Nymar showed Cole a tired smirk as the light in her eyes faded. Black tendrils crept out from the spot where she’d been impaled to grip the spear like several weak little fingers trying unsuccessfully to coax the weapon from where it was lodged. Suddenly, a rage swept through Cole’s entire body and he pushed the spear down until the metallic tip scraped against the cement beneath her.
“Answer me!”
She gripped the spear and was able to lift it up an inch or so while snarling savagely at him.
If not for the thorns in the handle, the spear might very well have slipped between his fingers or been taken away from him altogether. The Nymar’s burst of strength was not only fueled by the thing inside her, but from a final act of self preservation. She became stronger than any Nymar he had ever faced. Paige had warned him about jolts where a vampire could flush all of their blood-fueled power into a single attack. He was taught to either do as much damage to such a Nymar as quickly as possible or get the hell away until it faded. With his spear already trapped, both of those choices were blocked.
It was then that he felt a surge of his own.
His hands closed around the spear with the sole intent of preventing the weapon from being taken from him. As his grip became tighter, the thorns were driven in deep enough to hit nerves that hadn’t been deadened by previous contact or protected by scar tissue. They dug all the way through, growing longer due to the desperate commands rushing through his mind, until they formed little bumps on the tops of his hands. Letting out a primal scream, he straightened his legs and used both hands to scoop the Nymar up off the floor. She still grabbed the spear, if only to keep from sliding all the way down the length of the weapon like a hunk of meat that was too heavy for its kebob.
“Where’d you get one of our weapons?” Cole roared.
Vampire Uprising s-4 Page 38
