Blood Harvest

by Michael Weinberger

  Steve wanted to start searching through the faces; he had a sudden desperate need to find Lei. Where were the adults? The room was so vast it seemed to go on for miles. The combined number of bodies stacked on the gurneys made the number impossible to count. As far as Steve’s eye could see, all of the victims here were children. His mind raced to figure out the whereabouts of the adults from the mine, as well as all of those people taken from The Inferno incident, including his fellow LAPD officers.

  Steve was not going to get the chance to find any answers. A small group of security guards moved into the vault behind him. They were not subtle as they proceeded; Steve heard the sound of their footfalls as they entered the vault. He was caught out in the open and expected the guards to open fire as he dove for cover. None of them fired a shot.

  Steve’s thoughts went to Chris and his earlier prediction that the guards wouldn’t risk damaging their prizes stacked so meticulously inside the vault. Despite the fact that the guards were not shooting, they were advancing. Steve knew it was only a matter of time before he would be pinned down and a safe shot could be made.

  Steve only counted three guards; he could see them now, heavily armed and gaining steadily on his position. The weapons were high caliber assault rifles, the ordnance could easily penetrate the cover he was hiding behind. Steve peered around the bunk and to his surprise, saw Alpha sprinting around the corner of the vault. The man launched himself into the air, a feat which always seemed to defy gravity and never ceased to amaze Steve.

  Alpha crashed into the three guards. With brutal efficiency he rendered each guard unconscious before any of them could fire a shot. He was about to motion to Steve when he realized his surroundings and what it contained.

  The man deflated physically and the look on his face was so heart-wrenching Steve thought Alpha was going to fall to the floor and wail. Instead the look and physical weakening quickly vanished and the man straightened to his full height, powerful and determined. Reaching to his belt, he removed the small cell phone and flipped it open. He pressed a button on it and waited.

  Nothing.

  A look of concern crossed his face and then Alpha remembered, “We’re jamming the cell phones. Damn!”

  “Chris can get them back online. You need to get your people…”

  Alpha looked at Steve with such sorrow Steve’s voice caught in his throat.

  “I’m sorry son, but Chris won’t be able to help us anymore.”

  The great expanse of a room was completely quiet with the exception of the soft humming of the mechanical equipment.

  “No, No, you couldn’t have gotten to him and back again so quickly,” Steve said more to himself than to Alpha.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not lying to you. I found him downstairs with a bullet wound in his stomach. He was propped up against the information desk in the lobby. If it is any consolation to you I dispatched his killers.”

  Suddenly security forces materialized around each corner and wildly opened fire with high velocity ammunition; apparently they were no longer concerned about the collateral damage. The vault door was the only cover Steve and Alpha had; fortunately it was sufficient stopping power for what was being railed against it.

  Steve brought up the barrel of his weapon and aimed as the ricochets exploded against the door to his side. Alpha turned and began shooting as well causing the security force to momentarily seek cover of its own.

  Alpha reached for the heavy vault door and to Steve’s amazement was actually able to cause the astoundingly heavy door to slowly swing shut. The door was almost completely closed when Alpha suddenly jerked back, struck by a bullet to his side. The wound was superficial but still had enough force to send the man spinning. The heavy door continued to close in well-designed efficiency from the force Alpha had previously exerted until it closed with a thump, but did not lock.

  Sounds of men running forward to the door could be heard along with shouts of “Get that door open!” As hard as the men outside tried they couldn’t get a decent grip on the smooth exterior surface, winches or other devices could not be hooked to the door in order to force it open.

  Steve ran to Alpha, “How bad are you hit?”

  “I’m fine!” Alpha stated and with what little blood was coming from the area of the wound Steve believed him. “I’m also spent.” Alpha tossed his two pistols away and went oddly silent as he completely ignored his wounds, got to his feet, and moved to the bedside of one of his people. Alpha peered down at the tiny form lying motionless on the cot. Steve watched him from his position of cover.

  More than he saw it, Steve felt a change occur in Alpha at that moment. Nothing obvious or dramatic, but significant; like all the warmth had suddenly been sucked out of the room. Before Steve could raise a question about the strange occurrence, the door to the vault began to swing open.

  Men poured through the open space and pointed their weapons at the first enemy they saw. In this case it was Alpha who still stood motionless peering at the likewise immobile children in their makeshift beds.

  The security force looked at each other, uncertain of their next move. A deep guttural sound began to come from where Alpha stood, accumulating pitch until it was a voluminous wail of such anguish and torment it did not sound human.

  Steve stared in confused disbelief. The guards fired their weapons and Alpha, without further hesitation, exploded into action.

  Chapter 49

  Steve never saw where the gothic looking knives had come from; it was as if in a moment of extreme force and speed they had materialized in Alpha’s hands. Alpha moved so swiftly that as the first shots were fired, he had moved out of the line of sight of the weapons and was carving his way through the two dozen or so security forces. Steve watched in awed disbelief as Alpha managed to be one step ahead of the gunfire, cutting down the team in a graceful but brutally expert manner. Despite their best efforts, the guards couldn’t bring their weapons to bear on the whirlwind of death Alpha had become. A crazed panic found footing within the resolve of these exceptionally trained guards who began to shoot aimlessly into each other in an attempt to land a hit on Alpha.

  More than a half dozen of the guards had already been fatally stabbed, the cuts deliberate and purposeful toward the end of delivering certain death in the most prolonged and painful manner. Mercenaries to the core, those guards with their bodies still intact began a hasty retreat to the stairwell, abandoning their comrades to Alpha’s blades. With a sickening “thud” one of the great blades found a resting place inside the abdomen of the last remaining guard. The blade must have severed the abdominal artery for the blood came spurting out of the man in an explosion of liquid red. His body contorted then slumped onto the knife and draped over Alpha’s arm. Alpha kept the man otherwise aloft as he again howled in similar inhuman fashion.

  Steve was holding his breath so as not to draw the attention of the monster Alpha had become. Alpha was snarling demonically as he ripped the blade from the corpse he was holding. The sound of a woman’s scream diverted their attention and had a clearing effect on Alpha’s mind. He turned to Steve and shouted, “This way!”

  Alpha shot forward and turned down a hallway. Steve ran after him, finding himself following a bloody trail with no indication of its source. When he caught up with him, Alpha was slamming his body with tremendous force against a reinforced door in an attempt to break the door down. Voices could be heard behind the door, one was a man’s voice telling whoever was outside the door to “back off” and that he’d “kill the girl if you don’t back off.” The other voice was female and screaming, not in fear, but in fury, regaling the walls with obscenities of such vulgarity it would make a sailor blush. The gist of her tirade was that the person trying to break in should redouble his or her efforts and essentially mutilate the not very nice man inside.

  Alpha paused in his attempts to smash his body against the door to let out a roar. It was exactly that, a roar completely animal in nature and akin to that of a tig
er. Noticing Steve had joined him, Alpha’s body relaxed and he regained some of his composure.

  “Lei is behind that door isn’t she?” Steve asked Alpha who nodded his confirmation.

  “One of the guards retreated and locked himself in there with her. Why they were holding her in this room and not in a comatose state inside the vault I can only guess.” Alpha looked down at his cell phone on his belt. “Damn, if my cell phone worked I would have loosed my people on all of these men and this fight would be close to over by now.”

  “What the hell happened to you back there? I’ve never seen anything like that from you or any of our other people.”

  “We’ll have time for explanations later. We have to get word to the hunters before we are overwhelmed.” Realizing the truth behind Alpha’s words, Steve dropped the subject and began searching the surrounding offices for anything that could take the place of Alpha’s cell phone. The search was almost immediately interrupted by the sound of multiple footsteps rapidly approaching them growing in intensity as a second wave of guards arrived on the tenth floor and were closing in.

  “Damn! Throw me a weapon!” Alpha called out as he moved into the hall, his two knives at the ready and covered in crimson.

  Steve was about to join him when he noticed a traditional landline phone sitting on a desk in the office he had been searching. Chris had disabled the landlines by electronically severing the connections outside the building; however, another specific function of this particular phone had intrigued him.

  “Alpha! In here, quick!” Steve yelled with urgency.

  Not wanting to limit their movement inside a restrictive office space, Alpha moved reluctantly to Steve and looked at the phone Steve was pointing to.

  “I couldn’t find any working cell phones, but maybe they would be able to hear an intercom?”

  Alpha nearly ripped the phone out of the wall as he grabbed the handset and yelled into the speaker, “Hunters, to me, NOW!”

  Having neglected to press the button to engage the intercom would have otherwise made Alpha’s hollering into the phone comical, except the second wave of guards were now visible, sprinting to their location.

  “Press the button marked ‘intercom’! PRESS THE BUTTON!” Steve screamed.

  “WHERE? I DON’T SEE IT!!!” Alpha hollered back as he furiously pressed miscellaneous buttons in random fashion.

  Guards burst into the hallway and into the office screaming “FREEZE!” and “DON’T MOVE!” and “DROP THE WEAPONS!”

  The reality of being cornered in an office was overwhelming to Steve who slowly lowered the barrel of his weapon. Alpha was now only armed with the handset of the phone to his ear; still, one of the guards closest to Alpha called out orders to him.

  “You!” The man pointed to Alpha, “Put down the phone!”

  Steve turned to Alpha who just stood there with the phone to his ear, but in the periphery of Steve’s vision he saw an illumination on the keypad of the phone that had not been there before.

  Alpha raised a hand in apparent surrender and made a gesture as if to hang up the phone. Instead, he spoke calmly into the receiver, “Hunters to me now.”

  The sound of Alpha’s eerie voice and accent was amplified and boomed from multiple speakers throughout the hallway, and perhaps the whole building. The sound seemed to even surprise Alpha at first then he calmly, slowly, hung up the phone and looked patiently at the clearly disquieted man who had ordered the phone down.

  The man controlled his rage as he ordered both of them to lie on the floor. Each was in the process of complying with the command when a soft rumbling of noise began to grow in intensity. It sounded like something falling through a laundry or garbage chute.

  “Bang, clang, bang, whoomp, bang, clang.”.

  Steve and Alpha were already lying on their stomachs but looked up to try to find the source of the sound.

  From parts unknown within the building the sound continued to grow.

  Bang! Clang! Bang! Whoomp! Bang! Clang!

  Another sound was now emanating along with the first, like white noise initially, but slowly identifiable as human voices raised in a sort of battle cry.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

  Where the voices were coming from was impossible to distinguish. The guards looked up one hallway, then down another. No attackers could be seen. Steve watched as guards spoke into radio receivers in an attempt to coordinate what was happening with others who were probably watching from the security cameras in the same manner as Chris had been.

  The sounds were coming much faster now and growing louder.

  “BANG! BANG! CLANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! CLANG!!!”

  All hell was breaking loose at this point. Whatever was making the sound was right on top of them. In a moment of revelation, the guard who had ordered Alpha and Steve down to their stomachs looked up to the ceiling, just as the ceiling fell upon them.

  BANG!!! BANG!!! BANG!!! BOOM!!!!!!

  Down they came, practically raining from the ceiling, snarling with teeth flashing as they bore down on the guards. The hunters overwhelmed and sank their teeth into the throats of their prey in a similar but much more savage fashion than Lei had done in the alleys of Los Angeles. Each time a guard avoided or threw one of the hunters off of his person another was waiting to launch himself, full force, into the unattached guard and continue ripping at the flesh of the guard’s neck.

  All attention turned to the gothic scene in the hallway, a fatal mistake for the guards in the office. Alpha sprang to his feet and joined in the fray. There were three guards inside the office, the rest were being attacked in the hallway. Alpha grabbed two of the guards, spun them around and launched them out of the office and into the hallway where they were instantly set upon by a hunter. The last guard turned to face Alpha who quickly dodged behind the man, grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair, and wrenched the man’s head to one side so he had easy access to the man’s neck. Alpha sank his teeth in deep on the side on the man’s neck then shook his head in a kind of spasmodic vibration to assist in the tearing out of the man’s jugular vein. Steve stood mesmerized by Alpha’s savagery. When Alpha wrenched his head away, an enormous half moon shaped crater was formed along the side of the man’s neck. Something deep within Steve screamed to be let out. Steve felt his will dissipate.

  Alpha spat out the flesh he had removed, then clamped his mouth down around the wound and the steady stream of pulsating of blood that pumped from the man’s severed jugular. Alpha apparently held the man in a death grip as he flailed about uselessly while Alpha drank his fill.

  Grown men were screaming in terror; automatic weapons fired from pinned hands. Multiple hunters latched on to them and pointed them out of harm’s way. Each guard had at least two hunters attached to different parts of their bodies with merciless teeth and exploring tongues wrenching flesh free. They remained alive as the hunters fed upon their life blood.

  A guard who had broken free of his hunter was about to spray the room with automatic fire when Steve came back to life and slammed him to the floor, the force of impact sending the man’s weapon out of his grasp. Steve pinned the man’s arms with his body and one hand while he ripped the man’s shirt open with his free hand. He sank his teeth into the man’s throat, just as Alpha had taught him to do nearly sixty years ago. The guard screamed in agony as Steve tore chunks of soft flesh away from the man’s neck and began to drink the warm blood from the wound.

  Alpha was feasting on a new mercenary, his snow-white hair becoming stained by the bright red blood and he looked as ghastly as any ghoul that Hollywood could ever have dreamed possible. In the end, the hallway was filled only with the violent snarling and undulations of the hunters tearing away at their victims who, their blood sapped, flailed helplessly while the last moments of their lives slipped away.

  Alpha rose slowly to his feet. As he moved so too did all of the eyes of the hunters, even those still feeding. Without a word, the hunters
abandoned their victims and stood at a kind of attention. With a royal grace, Alpha raised an arm and pointed to the door behind which was Lei.

  Steve watched as the hunters moved toward the door. Alpha cut them off with a grunt, pointing up. Each of the nearly two dozen hunters shifted positions and began to form a human ladder until a few of them were again moving within the crawl spaces of the ceiling.

  A muffled crash emanated from inside the room followed by an animal like snarling and the pleading screams of a man begging for mercy. Then there was only silence until the sound of the locks on the door “click/clacked” as they were released. The door swung open slowly and revealed Lei standing in all regality, completely nude with a smear of blood running from her chin down her neck between her breasts to her navel. The bruises on her face and the small stitched area to one side of her abdomen didn’t take away from how impressive she was visually.

  Rage welled up inside him as Steve took in the sight of her injuries and a strength filled him as he moved forward, effortlessly shoving his fellow hunters aside before taking Lei into his arms and holding her tightly.

  Lei returned the fierce embrace, clinging to him in a more possessive manner than in an act of receiving comfort.

  Steve broke the embrace and put his hands to her face as he peered deeply into her eyes. He didn’t speak, instead he gently ran his fingertips over the welts on her cheeks and the split in her lip.

  “I’m all right.” Lei whispered. Her voice was soft, barely a whisper, and in it Steve heard the years of loneliness and longing she must have felt ever since he had left her all those years ago. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her…if she would let him.

  Lei looked up into his eyes, “you look awful.” She chided.

  Steve smiled and was surprised that he could find his voice, “I’m better now.”