by Craig Zerf
The club was situated in Camden Town. Past the canal lock and down an almost invisible side street, there was a single story warehouse. The windows were filthy and the doors scarred and unpainted. But if one looked closely it became obvious that the dilapidation was a mere facade. A Hollywood set. Post Apocalyptic chic, the scars by design and the filth applied by hand.
A simple but effective camouflage for a private club situated in the beating heart of an area that boasted a thriving nightlife.
Emily and her Yardies had cased the joint the day before and found a side room that was full of boxes and old furniture. They had decided to enter through this room, via the large set of windows. Samfy had disabled the alarm wires that were linked to the windows and then cut out one of the panes. After that it was a simple process to raise the latch, open the window and climb in.
Once in the room the team did a quick weapons check.
‘Right, boys,’ said Em. ‘Let’s go do some harm to the dark ones.’
She opened the door into the warehouse and they filed out into the corridor. At the end of the short corridor was another door. Again, Emily eased it open and peered around. It led directly into the club. A huge single room that had been divided up into smaller areas using shoulder high screens. Almost like a miniature maze. Various types of tables, chairs and sofas were laid out in the maze and a bar ran the whole length of the opposite wall. A multitude of mirror balls reflected snowflakes of light about the room and red spots wove back and forth like pinpoints of fire.
The music was an eastern influenced jazz, using sliding syncopations and based on the Arabic Freygish scale. Like a snake charmer with a drum set. It set Emily’s teeth on edge, the notes jarring against her western sensibilities.
Em wasn’t tall enough to see directly over the maze of partitions so Tagareg, at six foot six, cast his eyes over the set up.
‘Seems almost empty,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Maybe ten people scattered around. They all sitting singularly. None in groups. With this weird lighting and the sparkle of the mirror balls, I can’t make out if they’re vampires or not.’
‘This isn’t right,’ commented Stakkie. ‘My informant told me that this place would be buzzing. He reckons that it gets well full of bloodsuckers every Thursday night. Sometimes a hundred or more.’
‘I don’t like this,’ said Emily.
‘No worries,’ commented Tag. ‘I’ll just go grab one of these dudes and ask him where all the vampires at.’
‘Wait,’ said Em. But it was too late. With Tag, thought and deed happened almost simultaneously. He strode into the maze, approached the first person and pulled him to his feet, studying him closely as he held his MAC-10 submachine gun ready in case he was attacked.
‘They’re all humans,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘And they’re either well drunk or drugged.’ He shook the man a couple of times and then dropped him. He crumpled to the floor like he was asleep. Tag shrugged and turned to walk back.
But as he did so his face registered shock and, without warning, he opened up with his submachine gun, the silenced rounds tearing out at a rate of eight per second.
A body that seemed to have literally materialized in front of him was picked up by the stream of silver-tipped lead and thrown backwards, shrieking in agony.
‘Vamps,’ shouted Tag. ‘Everywhere. They’re lying down, hiding in the shadows below the partitions.’
As he shouted his warning, black clad vampires seemed to boil out of the ground. Ten, twenty, thirty. Countless.
The Yardies opened up, with long raking bursts of fire. Blood spayed into the air as the bullets struck flesh. Bastian and Emily charged forward, their swords weaving a destructive pattern in the air, cutting and slicing.
Em heard a shout of pain and saw Stakkie go down. A vamp latched on to him as he was reloading. Then another, and another. They tore at his flesh, opening his throat and spilling his life out onto the carpet.
With three mighty blows, Emily dispatched them. Stakkie looked up at her with pain filled eyes.
‘Do it,’ he croaked from his ruined throat. ‘Do it, girly before I turn.’
Emily choked back her tears as she slashed downwards, bringing an end to Stakkie’s life.
But there was no time to pause. No time for regret. No time for human feelings.
She jumped forward, parried a dagger wielded by a human familiar and then slashed upwards, disemboweling him with one stroke. He fell to the floor, his intestines rolling out of his wound like so much offal.
Tagareg had picked up Stakkie’s machine gun and now wielded one in each hand, firing in short controlled bursts. ‘Damn,’ he shouted. ‘They got us good. Ambushed us. Crap, we should have seen this coming.’
He moved forward, firing and kicking as he did so. Em watched his back, cutting down any vamps that got close to him.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Qwenga go down under a pile of blood suckers. And then Samfy. But both of them got back to their feet, firing their weapons, driving back their attackers, genuine smiles plastered across their faces.
‘Yeah, you don’t get me that easy,’ shouted Qwenga. He looked across at Emily. ‘No bites,’ he called. ‘I’s clean.’ He reloaded his MAC 10 and carried on killing.
‘And I,’ added Samfy.
But there were simply too many of them. And every vamp took an incredible amount of damage before they were neutralized.
Finally, Emily, Bastian and the remaining Yardies were forced into a circle, no longer attacking. Simply defending.
Fighting for their lives.
‘I’m almost out of ammo,’ yelled Tag. ‘Me too,’ shouted Stakkie.
There was a chorus of agreement from the other Yardies who were all burning through ammunition at a horrendous rate, shiny brass cartridge cases spewing from their weapons and covering the floor like discarded costume jewelry.
Man, thought Emily to herself. It just can’t get any worse than this.
And then the ceiling imploded.
Roof tiles buzzed through the air like shrapnel, exploding against the walls or smashing into exposed flesh. Whole sheets of corrugated iron spun across the room like giant blades, severing limbs of human and vampire alike. Large wooden beams crashed to the floor, crushing and maiming.
And then something came leaping down from out of the explosion and landed in the center of the room, legs astride, carrying the biggest machine gun that Emily had ever seen.
A Garwood electrically driven Gatling gun. The type normally mounted on a helicopter. Its barrels revolved as it spat out silver coated lead slugs at a rate of just over 3200 a minute. That is fifty four bullets a second. It sounded like a giant, tearing telephone books in half with one long continuous growl. The noise was beyond belief.
Vampires simply exploded as the massive quantities of ordnance tore them to shreds.
The Yardies threw themselves to the floor, as did Bastian and Emily.
Em looked up from her prone position to see that it was none other than William/Wolfman standing in the middle of the room. Incongruously her mind took in the scene and immediately started to work out how much his ordnance actually weighed.
The Gatling gun came in at ninety five pounds, three thousand rounds of ammunition at a further three hundred pounds and the two car batteries needed to drive the motor, another hundred and twenty. A total of five hundred and fifteen pounds. And he was wielding it like an assault rifle.
The fact that he had transformed into his Wolfman mode probably had something to do with it, as he stood over eight foot tall and his muscles bulged out like sacks of leather filled with nests of fighting snakes as they swelled and rippled.
And then the ammunition was expended and the only sound was the whirr of the barrels as they spun round.
That stopped as well. Silence.
William threw back his head and howled. The sound reverberated about the room, shivering the already fragile foundations and shaking bits of masonry and wood loose, filling the room
with dust and debris.
‘Now that,’ said Tag. ‘Is the most seriously kick-ass thing that I have ever seen.’
Chapter 31
