“Um…” he started, looking back at Costner, who nodded for him to go on.
“I always looked up to Force, to Erica,” he continued. “Before she was my mentor, my partner, she was my hero…”
He blinked. It was dark, then bright. Lights sizzled above him. Broken toys crunched underfoot. Doll parts.
Jeff blinked again. He was back in front of the crowd. What was going on?
He struggled on, trying to express himself. “I always looked up to her, wanted to be the hero, for her, for you all…”
He didn’t know what to say. What could he say? The whole situation made him angry at himself and at that thing who had killed Erica.
“Look,” he stated. “This is a vampire we’re facing. A monster. Like all of you, I want the police to search the city for this creature, unearth it, and destroy it before it kills again. They have to start now.”
Jeff immediately felt like he’d overstepped. He glanced at the commissioner, who looked surprised, but nodded his agreement.
“And I will join them,” he said more loudly. “I will be in the lead. Lavinia, as she calls herself, has to sleep somewhere during the day. We’ll find her and drag her out into the sun kicking and screaming! Erica will be avenged! This city will be protected!”
The crowd cheered.
Jeff stepped over to the line of policemen standing beside the podium. Together, they set off to hunt down his partner’s killer. He couldn’t help but think that Erica would have been proud.
Chapter 9
It was a hell of an afternoon, but it did keep Jeff’s mind off of his troubles, lingering questions, or anything else except finding the monster and making her pay.
After his surprisingly effective speech earlier, Commissioner Loch placed him and Detective Costner with a team of policemen to search for wherever the vampire Lavinia was resting.
They tried calling him Force, but Jeff wouldn’t let them, not yet. He couldn’t be the new Force, not with Erica’s killer still out there. To their credit, his team of police officers understood.
For now, at least, he was still Cadet Trainee Alpha.
Hours passed. Jeff’s team followed every tip and lead they had. They kicked in doors in the Haugville district, searching the dusty spaces to no avail. They pried open old crypts at the city’s two main cemeteries but found nothing except skeletons and statues of weeping angels. After that, they made their way through the decommissioned A and Q subway lines, pushing aside cobwebs and avoiding rats. Finally, they climbed down into the city’s sewer system, wading up to their chests in search of some sign of where the vampire slept.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
At six o’clock, Jeff and his team returned to a nearby police station to shower the sewage smell off of them and compare notes to figure out where in hell the monstrous woman could be.
“Wait,” Jeff said to the group, suddenly remembering something important from the fight the night before, something Lavinia had told Force. “I think we’ve been going about this wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Costner asked.
“She said she had been sleeping for decades,” he told them. “Just about everywhere we’ve looked was either built or dug up in the past twenty or thirty years. Her hideout can’t just be dark, it has to go back to the fifties or forties or even earlier than that. It has to be old enough for there to be no records of her and vampire-like killings, right?”
The policemen muttered their agreement, but where in the city could be old enough and untouched enough to meet those requirements?
Jeff concentrated on the fight, thinking back to any possible clue. One of the visions she put into his head rose to the surface.
“There was a moment in the fight,” Jeff started, “when Lavinia put images in my head.” The cops looked him over suspiciously but listened. He decided to skip over being abandoned by his mom in the second grade. “There was someplace dark, with old machinery and doll parts. Other broken toys were all over the floor.”
One of the older members of the team stood up. “Steamtown,” he said. “There used to be a couple toy factories there. My dad worked at one of them.”
A couple of the other older cops nodded.
Steamtown was the city’s decrepit factory district that had been mostly abandoned due to its toxic soil and wall-to-wall asbestos in the old pre-war industrial strip along the abandoned Wright Canal.
Lieutenant Oort burst into the room, his cell phone in hand. He’d been helping to organize the search with other precincts. Worry creased his forehead.
When they told him what they’d come up with, he nodded. “A team searching in that area hasn’t been answering their radios for the last twenty minutes. They were investigating an old toy factory at Milborne and a Hundred and Twelfth.”
“It’s the toy factory,” Jeff insisted. “It has to be. It’s what I saw.”
“Then get down there,” Oort told him. “I’ll call in all the teams we can call in, including SWAT.”
Chapter 10
Jeff was going to run to the scene. It would have been just as fast as taking the cruiser, but Costner and Oort insisted he needed backup and should conserve his strength, so Jeff agreed to the ride.
Detective Costner drove. Jeff rode up front, keenly aware why he was now sitting in the passenger’s seat and again quietly vowing to avenge his partner.
They pulled up to the large factory along with three other cruisers.
A Channel 37 news van followed closely behind. Costner swore quietly.
The SWAT van was on its way.
Two empty squad cars were parked in the lot, but there was no sign of the cops who’d gone into the boarded-up factory, nor were there any answers on the radio.
Jeff, Costner, and a half-dozen other cops shot ideas back and forth as the sun neared the horizon, casting an orange-red hue to the clouds.
“The vampire’s likely awake,” Costner suggested. “But if the stories are true, she can’t come out, not until the sun goes down completely.”
Jeff glanced past the building at the darkening sky. “We have to figure out what to do while we’ve got her trapped inside.”
“We could blow up the building,” one of the other cops suggested.
“Sure,” Jeff agreed. “But how long would that take to set up? And what if she has a safe room or someplace to hide? Besides, the SWAT team isn’t going to get here for how long?”
“Thirty minutes at best,” Costner lamented, “they were in the middle of an op down at the docks. ”
Jeff glared at the looming structure, bathed in graying-orange light. Every minute they wasted increased Lavinia’s chance to get away or, worse, start killing more cops right here.
“There’s too little daylight to waste,” Jeff insisted. “I should head in and do some recon, provide intel for the SWAT team when they get here.”
Costner held him back. “That vampire killed Erica. You aren’t going to stand a chance going into her lair all alone.”
“I know,” Jeff told him, painfully aware of that fact. “But if we are going to have a chance of taking her down, we need information to give the SWAT team when they get here, right?”
Costner reluctantly nodded. “Okay, kid,” he said taking Jeff aside. “I know you’re going to feel edgy in there. Erica would have been as well, to be honest. But you’ve got the best training she could have given you, so use whatever smarts you learned. I know she’d be proud.”
Costner couldn’t have known how much that helped.
“Oh, and just in case some of those old vampire legends are true,” the man added, “I picked up a few things you might be able to use to equal things out.”
Chapter 11
Detective Costner handed Jeff a few things they talked about earlier.
Jeff looked at the garlic, silver cross, and two wooden stakes with skeptically then shrugged his shoulders and muttered his thanks. Who knows? Maybe these, along with his abilities and training, would be enough t
o keep him alive if things escalated beyond simple reconnaissance. His eyes dropped to his gauntlets, which were packed with weaponry. Something in these might help, even if they hadn’t done the job for Erica.
A sour weight sank into his stomach. It had been less than a day since she’d been killed. How was he supposed to carry on without her?
Realizing that the cops were staring at him, Jeff nodded to the officers and snuck quietly into the factory through a smashed second-story window. It was one thing to have self-doubt. It was another to let others witness it. Tom’s words of confidence still buzzed in his mind. He was the city’s hero now and he needed to prove himself, not only to all of Force’s believers but to the police whose job it was to back him up as well. Their confidence in him was as important as how much he could bench press or how fast he could run.
These thoughts kept his mind occupied as he stalked the factory’s dusty hallways. That helped with his nerves. He also reminded himself he wasn’t looking for a fight right now. This little trip was simply a matter of scouting the scene so that the SWAT team would be in a better position to help out when the real fight kicked off and to ensure everyone got of out this alive, including him.
The old toy factory was darker and creepier than he imagined. Whole clouds of dust danced in the narrow beams of daylight that threaded the thin gaps in the walls. Toy and doll parts littered the floor, grayed under the thick coat of grime. Jeff cringed. This had to be the place.
He reached a larger hall and climbed the stairs, but stopped short at the sight of a dark figure standing in the open. Was it her? Had she heard him?
Jeff froze, certain he had screwed up. He clung to the wall, hoping to wait out whoever was waiting for him. After a few minutes, he exhaled, not realizing until then that he’d been holding his breath. He edged himself around the corner for a better look.
The figure hadn’t moved.
Jeff crept closer, moving from support beam to support beam until he saw the figure clearly enough to tell that it wasn’t Lavinia or any other vampire.
It was a mannequin.
He cursed softly to himself, upset that he wasted valuable time freaking out over a 50-year-old dummy. “No, moron,” he whispered. “I’m the dummy.”
Just then, his eyes settled on two bodies further down the main hall. Both were prone and wore deep blue police uniforms.
Jeff approached. He turned the first body over, revealing a slashed throat and not much blood. The second body was left in the same way. Definitely Lavinia’s work.
One of the police radios squawked. Jeff reached under the first body and clicked it off, worried the noise would attract attention.
A second squawk echoed from a nearby hallway. Jeff then noticed the second officer’s radio was missing.
Panic seized Jeff’s thoughts. If Lavinia had slept for decades like she claimed, then she was catching up to modern technology pretty quickly. She might be using the radio she’d stolen to listen in on police chatter. She may know that cops were massing outside this very moment.
Surprise was one advantage Jeff needed. Without it, his chances of ending this monster would go from slim to none.
Jeff advanced toward the sound slowly as an idea entered his mind. Perhaps she wasn’t as savvy as she seemed. If he could avoid being detected and if she kept the radio turned on, then he’d know where she was in the building, which would be invaluable intel for the SWAT team.
He followed the radio chatter around a second corner and then for another fifty feet before he was stopped cold by a horrid discovery.
The police radio hung in front of him, dangling from a hook.
The vampire was nowhere to be seen.
It was a trap and he’d fallen right into it!
Jeff turned to run but was hit hard in the side, sending him through a thin wall. Wood and glass shattered around him as he tumbled through the air. He finally slammed hard in the center of the building’s old factory floor.
He rolled to his feet, but he was shaken and embarrassed at how easily the vampire had lured him into her trap.
Lavinia leaped down in front of him. Billowing black fabric. White skin. Ruby-tinted eyes. Lips and claws.
Chapter 12
As it turned out, avoiding the vampire’s claws didn’t mean avoiding all of her strikes. Her second hit sent Jeff crashing against a massive metal press on the other side of the factory floor. True to his training, he hit the ground on his feet and ran to avoid the worst of Lavinia’s follow up attack.
There was no way he could compete with her strength, a strength even Force couldn’t handle.
“If you face a foe stronger than you,” she’d said during training. “Then you’re only hope of defeating them is to use hit and run tactics.”
He remembered Erica fondly, but he reminded himself that this wasn’t a fight. It was a chase.
Suddenly, Lavinia appeared in front of him. She didn’t hit him. She simply grinned.
This vampire wasn’t just stronger than him, she was faster than him as well.
Jeff threw a massive cast iron metal press at her, which she avoided with ease. He turned to his bag of tricks, but nothing Detective Costner gave him worked. Lavinia laughed at the garlic, splintered the wooden stakes, and crushed the silver cross with her bare hands. He fired his lethal and non-lethal gauntlet projectiles at her to the same effect. Nothing. Worse than nothing. She was enjoying it.
He took in a couple deep breaths, warily gazing at the vampire who struck him whenever she wanted, but for some reason made no effort to kill him.
Was she playing with him? Was that how her fight with Erica had gone?
“Why,” he breathed painfully, bruised ribs and worse making his voice harsh. “You killed Force. Why am I still alive? Is this just a game to you?”
Lavinia sauntered towards him, her ruby gaze matching his.
“Your mentor tasted so good, don’t you know?” she purred, licking her lips at the thought. She shuddered with pleasure. “I can still feel the energy from her blood coursing through my veins. I might still feel it for months, maybe even years. That is the power she bore within her, in her body, in her blood. You, little boy, only hold a fraction of that, for now. But in a few years, you might have blood as rich as hers. I’ve been around a long time, child, and with age comes patience. Fruit ripens. But there’s no reason we can’t play a little today.”
She was close enough for him to take a swing at, which he did.
Lavinia dodged his attack easily, then hit his chest like a pile driver, shoving him down to the floor. The vampire stood over him, her long incisors glistening in the dim light of the boarded-up factory, and asked, “Oh, poor boy, are you crying now?”
He wasn’t. Honest. The frustration and pain made his vision blurry. Jeff pulled himself up on his elbows, scowling.
The vampire leaned over him, still grinning that horrible grin. “You have every reason to cry,” she said. “I’ve seen you, where you were hurt, where you were broken, just like the toys scattered about this place. All your mothers are gone. Your mother left you and now your surrogate mother has abandoned you as well.”
“Force didn’t abandon me,” Jeff spat back. He rolled away, running for some possible exit. She chased him through three hallways and up two flights of stairs.
“Of course she did,” the vampire replied, taunting him. “They made the choice to leave you. Your mother could have stayed with your father and you, but you weren’t good enough for her. I gave your hero a chance to live out her life anywhere else in the world but this city. Instead, she chose death over a life with you. I’m sensing a pattern, Jeffrey. A pathetic one.”
Jeff backed himself into a corner, but one that offered some momentary safety. Three beams of crisscrossing sunlight punched through the cracks in the wall and the boarded-up windows.
Lavinia stood on the other side of the beams of light, still smiling but cautious. Maybe this one legend was true. Vampires couldn’t walk in the sunlight.<
br />
“My reign of blood has begun and my domination over this city is just a matter of time, Jeffy,” she taunted. “Crawl back as far as you can. You can’t save your police friends, your school friends, or anyone at all from me. Accept your fate. It will be much easier on you in the long run.”
Jeff frantically searched for an escape or anything to stop this monster. He looked up and saw that the boarded windows above curved over him. All he had left in his arsenal were a couple smoke grenades and a couple explosive rounds. That had to be enough.
He rose to his feet.
“We all have to accept our fates,” he told the vampire. “No matter how awful they are.”
Jeff fired his weapons straight up.
The windows above exploded and rained down glass and wood. Shafts of bright red and orange light from the setting sun shot around them, blocking off any possible escape for the vampire.
Lavinia screamed as the light struck her, burning her skin from alabaster white to coal black.
Jeff smashed more of the boarded-up windows, letting in more and more light from the setting sun.
“Damn you!” Lavinia cried out. She charged him, her skin smoking. Black ash cracked and flaked from her as she moved. “You will beg me to kill you!”
Out of ammunition, Jeff leaped at her. He pounded on the vampire’s searing flesh. Flames licked him as she burned alive.
He tackled Lavinia, hurtling them both out of the building and down three stories to the parking lot below.
They landed on the pavement hard enough to jar his bones.
Jeff rose to his feet.
“This is for Force,” he said as he struck the shrieking vampire hard across the face.
Her answer was an unintelligible howl. She flailed as the conflagration consumed her.
“This is for Erica!” he screamed as he landed the final blow.
Jeff stepped back from the unmoving vampire’s smoldering body. He kicked the piles of charred ash until the cool evening’s wind took all evidence that Lavinia had ever existed.
Superheroes Kill Vampires Page 3
