Extinction

by M. D. Massey

  “Ja jaeger, but none of us saw this coming. Don’t beat yourself up too badly for not being clairvoyant.”

  Kara laid a hand on my arm. “Hang on a minute, Scratch… what if this works in our favor?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, what if they came out in force to make this happen? What if the Dallas coven is here? Then, we don’t have to get them to come to us. All we need to do is set the trap and get the hell out of here without tipping our hand.”

  I looked at the rabbi, and he nodded as he rubbed his chin. “She has a point. It could work.”

  I grabbed both sides of Kara’s face and gave her an enthusiastic kiss. “Baby, you’re a genius.” Her lips were cold and unnaturally firm, but they responded in kind so I didn’t care.

  She smiled slightly as I pulled away from her. “FYI, this genius has always hated it when you called me baby,” she said softly. “But I’ll let it slide this once.”

  “So, what is our plan?” the rabbi asked.

  I tapped a finger on my chin as I gathered my thoughts. “Kara, what’s the blast radius of a W-76 warhead?”

  She scrunched her forehead and squinted one eye shut as she ran the calculations in her head. “A hundred megaton yield is standard for that warhead. I’d say the kill zone would be three miles, give or take. But considering the usual weather patterns out here, the fallout will be following us back to Austin. We’ll need to evacuate in a different direction, or be long gone when the device detonates.”

  And if Bobby, Gabby, and Sledge were still in that feed store when the thing went off… I just didn’t want to think about it.

  “Alright, that gives me something to work with. Kara, you take Josef and the rabbi to get what you need to cook us up a working nuclear warhead. It doesn’t look like there are any deaders inside the plant, so I’m going to scout around and make sure that the Dallas coven is really here.”

  Kara crossed her arms and shook her head. “Nope, it’ll take you too long and you’re more likely to get caught. Tell you what, I’ll do the scouting while you and the rabbi take Lurch here to snag some plutonium. Chances are good that I’ll already have the device ready by the time you come back. And if the Dallas coven is here, then we blow them to hell. If not, we take the device back and get them to come to us, then we blow them to hell. Deal?”

  “Fine, fine—be all liberated and stuff, see if I care,” I said with a halfhearted frown. “Just please be safe.”

  “I believe that goes without saying, but I appreciate that you’re so concerned about my welfare. Now get moving, because as slow as you two are, I’ll likely be done by the time you get back.”

  “Whatever,” I said with a slight smile. “Rabbi, you ready?”

  “Of course. Let us be on our way.”

  I headed down the hall, but was stopped by a red-haired, pale-skinned blur. Kara pecked me on the cheek, then she stepped aside.

  “Now you can go,” she said, before effectively disappearing from our view by moving at top vampire speed.

  The rabbi chuckled and gave me a wink. “She is quite the woman, ja? More than a match for you, I think.”

  I began walking down the hall, senses on high alert. “You think we can make it work?”

  He shrugged. “Anything is possible. You love each other, so that is in your favor. I’ve seen many interspecies relationships in my time, between supernatural creatures and humans. Some worked out, and some ended in tragedy. You simply cannot know the outcome of such a union until you try.” He paused and glanced at me sideways. “And you’re not exactly human anymore, yourself.”

  “I suppose that’s true, Rabbi. I guess now that I know she’s still the same Kara deep down, all the rest doesn’t matter. I thought I’d lost her once, when the ’thropes took her, and again when I discovered she was a vamp. At this point getting her back, or even the prospect of it—well, let’s just say I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “And you’d do well not to—” he cut himself off, continuing in hushed tones. “Josef senses someone coming. We must hide, now!”

  A quick scan of the area revealed no readily available place of concealment. I looked at the floor behind us, groaning inwardly at the tracks in the dust that we’d left.

  “I don’t think that’s an option, Rabbi,” I whispered as I drew my katana and went back to back with Josef, who picked the rabbi up and placed him on his shoulders.

  “I smell human blood,” a male voice whispered. He had a strong Gulf coast accent, so I knew he wasn’t a local. He chuckled softly, then his laughter faded into a low growl. “And I hear two heartbeats.”

  “Be ready, jaeger,” the rabbi whispered, although for what I had no idea. I tightened my grip on my sword.

  A tall, slender man with dirty blond hair flitted into view ahead of us, dressed in faded jeans, All-Stars, and a Kanye t-shirt. He wasn’t as fast as Calypso or even Kara, but he was fast enough to give me pause. “I don’t know who y’all are or how you got in here,” he said, “but if you’re looking for a safe place to hide from the dead outside, well… you’d be better off facing the mob.”

  “We’re just passing through,” I said. “And not looking for any trouble.”

  “Ah, but trouble already found you,” the vamp replied.

  The rabbi tossed something at the vamp, almost casually, and he snatched it out of the air. It was a tiny vial filled with a greyish-brown powder.

  The vamp looked at it and grinned. “Was that supposed to be a distraction or something?”

  Rabbi Borovitz frowned. “More like an intelligence test, you shmendrik. Shabar!” he said with authority in his voice. The glass vial shattered, and the powder inside filled the air. The vampire began to bat at the dust rapidly with both hands, which only agitated the air and made it worse. Soon his every exposed surface was bubbling and smoking, wherever the dust touched. The vamp shrieked in rage and pain.

  “Now would be the time to act, hunter,” the old man said with a hint of impatience in his voice. That shocked me into action, and I stepped forward and cut the vamp’s head off.

  “Silver powder?” I asked.

  “Chlorargyrite, to be precise. We were fortunate he was a young one. He has probably never felt the bite of silver before, nor met a human willing to resist him. And he was too dumb to run away.”

  “Lucky us,” I mumbled. “You got any more of that stuff?”

  “Unfortunately, that was my last phial.”

  “Well, hell. Alright then, let’s hope we don’t run into another one.” I dragged the body into a nearby metal cabinet. I stuffed it inside and tossed the head in before I shut the door. “Let’s go get that plutonium.”

  Despite being spread out over several acres, all the buildings on the plant campus were connected by long, enclosed hallways. The benefit to this for us was that those structures blocked off certain areas of the facility from the dead. They might have had the outer cordon surrounded, but there were no dead inside the courtyards between buildings.

  That was fortunate, because I didn’t want to take the risk of moving from building to building down those hallways. All we needed was to tip our hand by running into another vamp on patrol. For that reason, we opted to sneak to our intended destination by traveling outside the buildings, using safety berms and drainage ditches to hide our passage. The berms had been built to block radiation between one building and another, and the rubber-lined drainage ditches were likely created in case they needed to flush radioactive material from one of the labs.

  I wondered how much radioactive material had leached out of the soil over the years, and whether we were unknowingly being fried from the inside out. If we pulled this off and I ended up dying from cancer, I was going to be pissed.

  After several tense minutes of sneaking around, we made it to the entrance of one of the underground plutonium storage bunkers. Unfortunately, the vamps were already there, and hard at work trying to get inside. Three pale-skinned figures were working with
a cutting torch, diesel generator, and grinder, trying their damnedest to remove the thick steel door to the bunker.

  We hid around a corner and observed them for a moment. Between the torch, grinder, and generator, there was no way they were going to hear us. Yet they were smart enough to have the third vamp standing watch—a short stout guy in a dirty jean jacket, sporting a greasy Kenny Powers beard and mullet.

  Fortunately, the sentry was currently engrossed in a trashy romance novel, instead of paying attention to his environment. Using hand signals, I indicated that I’d take the guard out, and Josef would take out the others.

  There was nowhere to hide and no cover I might use to sneak up on him, so I decided to take the direct approach. I took off my gun belt, scabbard, and ruck sack, and held my sword by the handle near the guard, tip-up and hidden behind my back. I angled it so the last few inches of the blade were concealed behind my head, and casually walked around the corner and toward the sentry with both hands behind my back, as if I were another vampire here to check up on their progress.

  The only thing that might give me away was if he sensed I was human, so I tried to move as smoothly and gracefully as possible. I was gambling that he wouldn’t be able to hear my heartbeat over the noise. I knew I couldn’t hear a damned thing other than the ruckus they were making, and I hoped he couldn’t either.

  Kenny Powers spotted me immediately, dismissing me with a glance and going right back to reading his novel. But as I got closer, he sensed that something wasn’t quite right, and he looked up from his book to examine me more closely.

  I smiled. “How’s the work coming along?” I asked with casual indifference. I realized my mistake when his eyes widened slightly. Damn it, Scratch, you don’t have the right teeth to be a vamp. I shrugged. “Mom always said that every time I opened my mouth, it got me in trouble.”

  The vamp dropped his novel just as I swung the sword up one-handed, slicing the book in two down the spine and opening the vamp up from stem to stern… or sternum, as it were. He grabbed at his intestines as they spilled out onto the floor, fumbling with the slick, snaky organs that dripped with his dark, almost black blood. I continued the arc of the sword straight overhead, then swung it around in a two-handed cut that took his noggin clean off his shoulders.

  DIVIDEND

  Josef was already coming around the corner, but the smell of the sentry’s spilled guts must have alerted one of the other vamps. She stopped grinding on the door and flipped up her welder’s mask, revealing a thin Anglo face with pockmarks and an overbite that put her upper fangs on full display. Despite her bad complexion, she was attractive in a way that only a vamp or runway model could pull off, somewhat reminiscent of a Cara Delevingne or a young Jessica Lange.

  Damn it, I thought. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen when they turned her.

  But innocence had long been lost on that one. She saw Josef and me at the same time, responding with a scowling hiss just as the golem crashed into her and the other vamp. Josef managed to grab the welder by the neck, snapping his neck and rendering him of no consequence instantly.

  Unfortunately, overbite girl was quicker and smarter. She quickly recovered from the collision, bouncing into the vault door and launching off it parkour-style. The vamp then proceeded to run sideways along the wall, coming at me with a speed no human could match. Her eyes were murderous, and a wicked yet gleeful smile graced that pretty, pockmarked face.

  No doubt about it, she meant to be my death. But I was ready for her, and while she might have been gnawing on any normal human before they could react, I was no normal human. Unable to step out of the way in time, I leaned back like I was playing limbo and raised my blade, severing one of her hands as she passed. The vamp shrieked as she landed in the hall beyond, clutching her stump to her chest.

  I saw this all happen in the span of a split-second as I fell to the floor. Josef was already running past me at the little vampire girl, but she was no fool. She hissed one last time and headed down the hall at speed, thankfully ignoring the rabbi as she made her escape.

  “Well, shit,” I said as I rolled over and stood up.

  “Indeed,” the rabbi replied. “More of them will be here soon. Josef, if you would be so kind?”

  The old man pointed at the thick vault door at the end of the short hall. The golem complied, grabbing it by the handle and a hole that had been made by the cutting torch just moments before. He braced one leg against the wall and strained with all his prodigious strength, yanking on the door with sinew-popping force until the concrete wall around the frame began to crack. Within moments, both the vault door and frame broke away from the wall in a cloud of dust, and Josef let the entire mechanism fall to the floor with a resounding crash.

  “I guess that’s one way to do it.” I looked down and noticed that Kenny Powers’ snakeskin boots were sticking out from under the vault door, like the Wicked Witch of the East. “Ding dong, mother—”

  The rabbi cut me off. “Yes, yes, we have triumphed over evil, hooray and all that. Now, let us get what we came for before the waif’s companions come to finish what she couldn’t, ja?”

  “Fair enough, Rabbi, fair enough.”

  We entered the storage facility, heading down a short concrete tunnel into a room that was lined with black metal barrels marked “PLANT USE ONLY” in yellow stenciled lettering.

  “Huh,” I remarked. “I thought the storage containers would be more high-tech.”

  “What, you expected a yellow metal suitcase with radioactive symbols all over it? This isn’t a Michael J. Fox movie, jaeger.” The rabbi walked up to one of the barrels, rapping it with his knuckles. “This one, Josef—and another, just in case.”

  I chuckled. “Look at you, old man, with the pop culture references.”

  He scowled, but his eyes twinkled. “I watched television too, back before all this scheisse began.”

  The golem tucked a barrel under each arm and we headed out of the building, moving as stealthily as we could as we made our way back to the assembly facility. When we arrived, it looked as though we were alone.

  “Psst… over here!” I turned to see Kara sticking her head out from behind a large metal door, similar to the one Josef had torn from the wall of the storage bunker. “Bring those barrels in here, then you need to get lost. There’s no telling how much radiation is leaking from the plutonium pits inside these containment barrels.”

  I covered my man parts with my hands. “Great, now you tell me.”

  Kara rolled her eyes. “I think you’ll be fine for the moment, but you probably don’t want to be around when I crack them open. Speaking of which, look what I found.” She gestured at a large red conical object that was standing nose-down in a made-to-fit rack nearby.

  “The warhead, I presume?” She nodded. “So, I take it the rest of the Dallas coven is here?”

  She flashed a grim smile. “They must have left a skeleton crew back in Dallas, because there are at least a dozen ancient vamps here. Hell, there’s so many younger vamps running around, no one questioned my presence while I was poking about. I grabbed this warhead right in front of a work crew, and no one even gave me a second look.”

  The rabbi cleared his throat. “About that—we came across a few vampires, and one escaped.”

  I shrugged sheepishly. “She was too quick for me—for us—to catch. Sorry, but they’re probably searching the plant as we speak. How long do you think it’ll take you to get this thing armed and get a timer rigged?”

  Kara frowned. “I can probably do it in under thirty minutes, working at vampire speed. But, you’ll have to keep them away from me while I work.”

  I looked at the rabbi, and he at me. “We can do that,” I said. “But what’s the plan after you arm it?”

  Kara’s eyes went flat and cold. “I’m going to set the warhead to detonate in an hour, and we don’t want to be anywhere near here when that happens. It’s going to leave a smoldering wasteland a half-mile wide wher
e this plant used to be, incinerating everything biological within that radius.”

  The rabbi shook his head. “That doesn’t seem like a very big window in which to make our escape.”

  “It’s not, but if we hurry we could easily be twenty miles away when it blows. So long as no one finds it before then, that is. I figure if I hide it on top of one of these buildings, they’ll never realize it’s there until it’s too late. I’m also hoping that the increase in elevation will slightly reduce the amount of fallout created by the blast. An air burst would be better, but it’s the best I can manage without being able to drop the warhead from high altitude.”

  “It’s a risky plan, but I think that it’s our best shot,” I said as I looked at my battered military watch. “We’ll keep them away from you while you work. When you’re done, meet us at our original entry point at the front of the plant.”

  I turned to go and she stopped me, grabbing me by the shirt. Her eyes spoke volumes as she looked up at me. “Be safe, Scratch. Don’t make me come rescue you, alright?”

  I kissed her lightly on the lips. “We’re just going to play a little game of misdirection, is all. Trust me, I’ll be fine.”

  As soon as we were out of Kara’s listening range, I turned to the rabbi. “I am not going to be fine, because there’s no way in hell those vamps aren’t going to find us.”

  He nodded. “I agree. What do you intend to do?”

  “First, I’m going to create a distraction that’ll draw most of the deaders away from the south side of the plant. You think you can get past the stragglers if I do?”