Blood Work

by L.J. Hayward

  Chapter 3

  I had vague ideas as to where the remaining humans were in the maze, so I forwent stealth for speed. The vampires would know I was there now, anyway. They wouldn’t have missed the death of one of their own. So as I moved, the vampires moved as well.

  Hurtling around a corner, blinded by a flare of irritatingly pink laser, I sensed three vampires converging on me rapidly. Two shadows leaped out of side corridors, moving with the lithe, powerful grace of all vampires. Very weak tendrils of psychic whammy proceeded them, easily brushed aside as I threw myself into a skid, leaning back and firing a wide spray of paintballs.

  I won’t lie and say it was like a scene from Tour of Duty, but that’s because I was firing paintballs, not bullets, and unlike bullets, paintballs can be foiled by cotton clothing. Still, enough of the paint hit exposed vampire flesh for there to be a sudden gush of smoke and howling loud enough to drown out the music for a moment.

  Taking the second of distraction it got me, I scrambled to my feet and staggered backwards, firing with the added benefit of at least pretending to aim this time. I’d been lucky with the first vampire. Seemed contact with the soft tissues of the mouth let the paint work faster, because it took more than one ball to stop this pair. They chased me like feral panthers, eyes gleaming burnished-silver in the strange lighting, predator bright and enraged. One male, one female, their skin sizzling in places from the paint but it didn’t seem to be slowing them down at all.

  I made sure to take new turns, so I wouldn’t lead them right back to Roberts and the girl. I gained a little lead, so I spun, fired, spun and ran. As I went, I ejected the empty mag, letting it fall to the floor, grabbed a new one and slammed it home. Sensing an attack, I hit the floor in a clumsy roll. A dark shape sliced through the air I’d just vacated. I fired and fired into it as it went over, rewarding me with a pained squeal and a burst of flames on the vampire’s body as it crashed into the wall.

  Shoving out with a boot, I stopped myself before I rolled right into the flaming heap. Twisting, I brought the Eagle up and fired the last ball in the mag right into the bared midriff of the female as she launched herself at me. Green paint glowed in a burst of black-light, then it vanished as the Holy water worked like acid on the pale skin. Howling, the vampire performed one of those freaky, midair turns they were so good at and, rebounding off the walls, fled.

  On my belly, I changed mags, wished for a moment I had a gun with a greater capacity, then fired after her. One hit the back of her right knee. She wore tiny Daisy Dukes, leaving her legs naked. The paint ate through skin, muscle and ligaments, effectively hobbling her. The vampire hit the deck like the proverbial.

  Once again hauling myself to my feet, I ran to where she was trying to stand. Calmly, methodically, I painted her until she imploded. There wasn’t even enough left to ignite like the last bastard.

  Thinking of him let my mind comprehend the growing heat behind me. I spun, wondering that the body was still on fire. The moment the vampire died, it should have turned to primordial sludge, extinguishing the flames. But no. The fire was growing, eating at the material of the wall.

  Fuck me.

  Even dead, vampires were a pain.

  Orange flames, sparking with shades of purple, blue and red from the lights, grabbed at the flimsy wall. They crawled upward with startling speed, spewing dark-grey smoke, clouding the already cloudy atmosphere of the room. The acrid taste of it reached me, burning in my mouth and nose, stinging my eyes.

  I had nothing to fight a fire with. Absolutely nothing. Well, not quite.

  Half out of my jacket, thinking I could beat at the flames with the thick material, two things happened in very quick succession.

  Firstly, and thankfully, the games session cut out. The music died, the laser show stopped and a mass of fluorescent tubes turned on, bathing the area in clean, clear light. Sprinklers on the ceiling spurted once, twice, then gushed, spraying water everywhere.

  Eyes blinded by the sudden brightness, I nearly missed the second, and worse thing. Even as I caught a glimpse of it flying at me from the top of the burning wall, I remembered the third vampire I’d sensed.

  Left arm tangled up in my jacket, I tried to twist out of the vampire’s way. I wasn’t fast enough, catching the ballistic creature on my right side. Impact lifted me off the ground, threw me into a wall. It was a movable one, fastened in place with only a couple of bolts. My weight and that of the vampire broke the base of it and we all went arse over tit into the next corridor.

  I came up wet, sore, bleeding and incredibly angry.

  A veil of red dropped across my vision and everything suddenly felt hot. My skin burned and the air in my lungs churned. The gun had been knocked out of my hand, but I didn’t much care at that stage. Bellowing what I would later hope was a decent, sphincter-weakening war-cry, I lunged for the vampire.

  He was fast, faster than me, but berserk rage fuelled my limbs and I was on him before I could think. There was a roaring in my head, a pressure that needed to be vented and the only way I knew how to do that was to hurt something. Lucky me. I had something right in front of me.

  It degenerated into a blur of fists and fangs and spraying blood, some of it watery—the vampire’s—some of it not—mine. I’m pretty sure the slow-mo replay would reveal nothing elegant or even stylised about it. It was dirty, mean and primitive; two savage animals in a fight to the death. The water from the sprinklers hindered both of us, made us slippery and hard to hold. Mixing in smears of blood didn’t help. I had him at one point, one arm locked around his shoulders, my other fist pounding relentlessly into his already pulpy face. My knuckles were bleeding freely, smashed raw on his hard jaw, ripped open by his sharp teeth. Then the bastard managed to wriggle out of my hold.

  He shoved me into a wall, again. This one wasn’t temporary. It was hard. Brick under a coating of thin plywood. The back of my head hit with a dull thud and for a moment, the red haze burned bright white. Then he was on me, pinning my arms to my sides. His head reared back, ready to slam his forehead into my face. I pulled to the side, caught his blow on my shoulder. It flared with an intense pain I was going to feel later, if I even had a later, that was.

  I was trapped, held tight to the wall, and now that he had a hold on me, his superior strength became a benefit. Didn’t mean I had to give in. I kicked and thrashed and howled, the berserker inside me let completely loose. But then I felt something that froze me for a split second.

  Two sharp points against my neck.

  He was trying to bite me. No fucking way.

  I’d been trapped like this before. The vampire had fed on me that time, and I’d vowed never again.

  Just what I could have done is beyond me. Thankfully, my lack of coherent thinking didn’t kill me.

  A dark blur flashed in from my right and the vampire was gone. Vanished.

  Released from the pressure of the vampire’s hold, I hit the floor, still trying to catch up to current events. The only possibility that came to my anger-addled head was that the vampire had been carried away by something faster than it. And there was only one thing faster than an immature vampire in my experience—a mature one.

  I spun around, looking for the vampires, but they were long gone. With the immediate threat over, the rage inside cooled somewhat. Not completely, but enough to let a few higher brain functions through to the front. I had to keep hunting, protect the humans, and to do that, I needed my weapon.

  The Eagle was under a pile of broken wall, undamaged as far as my quick inspection went. I fired it to make sure the water hadn’t buggered it up. A splot of green paint hit the wall and dribbled down rapidly in the wet.

  By feel I ejected the mag and inserted a new one even as I closed my eyes and reached for Mercy. She was fighting a couple of the vampires, not far away. The remains of the berserker rage still bubbling through my blood, I headed toward her.

  The maze wasn’t as daunting in the steady, white light and after a half minute o
r so, the sprinklers switched off. I turned a corner and found a pool of post-vampire slaying gloop. Mercy had bagged one. Around another bend, a bigger splattering of ooze. Two, or maybe three small ones. Six or seven down. Go team.

  Mercy was on the move, ahead of me and accelerating. The need to hurt something was lingering in my body like an overdose but there was nothing for me to take it out on. My partner was obliterating the young vampires without pause. I raced past three more execution sites in quick succession, then a familiar sound hauled me up so quick I nearly got whiplash.

  “Help!”

  These vampires weren’t old enough to have mastered much more than crude vocalisations, certainly no words. It was human.

  Twisting about, I headed down a side-corridor, around another corner and into a dead end.

  Five people were crowded into the narrow space, pushing back into what had to be a solid wall because with their weight and desperation, a movable one would have been kindling by now. They were mostly kids, like the first girl, dressed for a game of laser-tag. In front, protecting them, was a part Aboriginal man probably around my age, narrow across the shoulders, slightly saggy around the waist. He wore a shirt with a rudely fluorescent logo, ‘Surf Wars!’. The game attendant.

  Between him and me, a vampire.

  She was lean, with the broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, long legs of a swimmer. Sun-bleached hair kept short was a shaggy mess around her face. A couple of weeks ago, when she was still human, she would have been tanned. Now, she was a sickly shade of brownish-yellow, heading for the white of a creature of the night. She, too, had learned tonight just what she was now. There was blood smeared around her mouth, streaking her hands and splattered across a T-shirt proclaiming ‘In case of emergency, Break Dance!’.

  The vampire hesitated. This was probably the first time in her new life she’d been faced with a decision. I could see her trying to do a threat assessment on the situation. Five bags of food versus one with a really angry expression. Which to choose.

  I was hyped up on just enough couldn’t-give-a-fuck to throw caution to the wind. In the split second it took her to pick me, I was on her. One arm wrapped around her shoulders, I pushed the barrel of the Eagle right into her ear and squeezed the trigger.

  Let me say this and then we’ll leave it alone.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Covered in vampire remains, I picked myself up off the slippery floor and faced five very stunned people.

  “Gas leak,” I said. “You’re all hallucinating.”

  They kept staring, and the attendant guy gathered the kids behind him more securely.

  With a clatter, the empty mag hit the floor and I fished the last full one out of my pocket. “You know the way through the maze?” I asked Attendant Guy.

  He nodded, fast and worried.

  “Go back to the start. You’ll find a guy in a suit and one of the other kids there. Stay with him.”

  Another nod, but no movement. Apparently, I was as scary as a vampire. Yay me.

  I backed out of the dead-end, giving them room to ease past me.

  Ushering the kids back the way I’d come, Attendant Guy paused. “There’s another kid in here somewhere.”

  “Yeah, I know. You just get those ones out. And thanks for coming in after them.”

  He turned to leave, then stopped again. “Thanks for coming in after me.” Then he was gone, herding his frightened, bloodied charges toward safety.

  Once more alone, I took a moment to get a sense on the last kid. And, as it turned out, the last vampire. There was one more still alive, very close to the human. Further afield, Mercy was coming in at speed. I was closer, but she was faster.

  When I came around the last corner, the first thing I saw was the boy. Maybe fourteen if he was a day, lying face down on the floor. Leaning over him was a vampire.

  Petite, sweet bodied and adorable with curls of black hair that reached her shoulders and surrounded a heart-shaped face. Her skin was flawless, moonlight cast in soft, silky textures. Blood-red lips peeled back from perfect white teeth, two of which were terrifyingly long, pointed canines. Her eyes were the reflective silver of a hunting predator.

  About to take a gigantic bite out of the boy, the dark-haired huntress sensed my presence. Her head snapped up and her alien gaze pinned me. The wash of her psychic powers rolled over me in a great, swamping rush. It snapped into my limbs whip-crack fast, trying to paralyse me.

  This was no immature vampire; not some half-arsed monster who didn’t know what to do with all its strength and skills. She was everything the mob of fledgling vampires had wanted to be but never would be now. Everything about her spoke of power and dominance and deadliness. Her psychic whammy was perfectly aimed to take me out.

  And you know, I would have been toast if I didn’t have a psychic link to her.

  I jerked that link like a dog trainer on the business end of a choker chain. It broke Mercy’s concentration, pulled the power she directed at me back through her and along the link. Reversed, the psychic whammy slammed into her.

  The sudden backwash of power knocked her off her feet. She slammed against a wall. Being a temporary one, it broke and she disappeared into the next corridor in a shower of dust and splinters.

  Score one to me.

  With a bit of breathing room, I looked around and found a puddle of vampire goo. Mercy had finished it off before I even got here.

  Kneeling by the kid, I checked his pulse. Strong and steady, just dazed. I lifted him into my arms and turned to find Mercy picking her way out of the rubble with delicate steps, brushing down her black T-shirt and jeans as she went. Her eyes were their normal dark-brown colour.

  She looked up at me with a serious pout. “You tore my shirt.”

  I swear the rip was tiny and a few seconds with a needle and thread, good as new, but to look at her devastated expression, you’d think I’d drawn a goatee on the Mona Lisa.

  “Really? That’s what you’re leading with? How about sorry for trying to whammy me?”

  A flash of silver across her eyes, then just plain brown as she ducked her head. “Sorry.”

  I could’ve almost felt sorry for her, but didn’t. As enticingly woman-shaped as she was, she wasn’t human. She did a bang up job at pretending but that was as far as it went. Her words sounded repentant, yet they weren’t. It was a learned response, like everything else she did.

  Still, it was the response I expected, so I relented. “Good job, kiddo. You cleaned this mob up like a pro.”

  Face still downcast, I barely saw the smile quirk her lips up. “It was easy.”

  Adjusting the boy, who was starting to squirm, I said, “Let’s go find Roberts. Then we have to think of how much we’re going to charge Barry for trashing his joint.”

  Mercy nodded and trooped alongside me, tiny and cute and just moments away from having been a mindless, raging killer. I’d be lying if I said the image of her leaning over this kid sat easy with me. Again, Roberts’ words about trusting her came back to me, but I pushed them away forcefully. All in all, for her first time out on her own, she’d done really well, and maybe she’d just been going to check the boy’s pulse...

  With those sobering thoughts, the last of the berserker rage left me. I came down off the violence-high and all the injuries I’d suffered crashed in all at once. My shoulder throbbed, my jaw ached, lightning shot through my left knee—never fully recovered from being shattered several years before—and my hands, raw from smashing that vampire’s face, spasmed and went numb.

  Uh oh.

  Vampire blood was a nasty cocktail of toxins and sedatives, as was their saliva. In large enough amounts, either was enough to knock out a human cold. Along with their psychic blow, it’s how they keep their food compliant. The open cuts and abrasions on my fists weren’t too bad, but now that the adrenaline was fading, the toxins were having their carefree way with my body.

  “Mercy,” I managed as my legs began to buckle. “Take the.
..”

  And I was gone, falling into darkness and painless oblivion.