Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth (Book 3): Vampire Lord 3

by Jacobs, Logan

  I pulled out Nat’s phone, opened up a new message thread, and typed out something for them to read, so I wouldn’t have to talk and make any noise.

  Are you hurt? I typed and then showed the girls.

  Both girls glanced at each other, shrugged, and then shook their heads.

  When was the last time Isaac fed? I typed.

  When I showed the girls that message, both girls seemed surprised that I already knew Isaac was a vamp. But then the blonde gestured for me to give her the phone. Because her hands were still zip-tied, she couldn’t hold it, so instead, I just held it in front of her, and she typed her response with her index finger one painstaking letter at a time.

  1hr, she typed.

  I heard the sound of more broken glass from somewhere outside this small study room, and I guessed that Isaac was probably taking out his rage on the other glass door to the rare book room. And since he was far enough away, I figured I could risk a quick conversation, so the blonde wouldn’t have to type one letter at a time.

  “From both of you, or just one of you?” I hissed.

  “Both,” the pink-haired Japanese girl replied.

  “Shit, that means he’s strong,” I muttered.

  “He’s, like, really strong,” the blonde whispered. “You know he’s one of them, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, and he’s also a goddamn psychopath now,” the pink-haired girl added. “He’s… he’s… awful.”

  “Are you… so you’re Sam?” Isaac’s girlfriend asked. “Natalie’s boyfriend?”

  I nodded again.

  “I don’t care who you are, just as long as you--” The Japanese girl stopped when she saw my guns. “Do those mean that you’re gonna help us?”

  “I am,” I replied. “I’ll be back for you as soon as it’s over, but right now, I need you to stay quiet, and stay exactly where you are, okay?”

  “But Isaac’s a vamp, and he--” the blonde started. “Well, you’re just a human, right? And if you--”

  “Chill,” the other girl interrupted her. “He made it here, didn’t he?”

  “I’ve got it,” I said. “Just stay put.”

  The girls both nodded, so I exited out of that message thread and reopened the one to Isaac. I knew that he was onto me by now, but I figured a little bit of misdirection couldn’t hurt anything, so I typed up another message and sent it.

  Someone else up here with you? I texted. Heard noise. Going back to stairwell.

  Then I slipped the phone back into my pocket, stepped back out into the hallway, and closed the door gently behind me. I moved down the hall toward the stairwell that was closest to the rare book room. Even though I didn’t think Isaac would be dumb enough to go there, I hoped it would at least put him on the move, and maybe I would hear his footsteps before he heard mine.

  But when I reached the stairwell, there was still no sign of him, so I had to slip back out in between two bookshelves and try to listen for him from the main part of the floor itself.

  “I know it’s just you, Sam!” Isaac suddenly shouted from the middle of the floor. “Just come out already, and stop wasting my fucking time!”

  That was one way to figure out where this asshole was.

  I didn’t say anything in response. Instead, I just followed the sound of his voice toward the middle of the aisles, but I stopped right before the aisle where I thought he was. I picked up the closest book to me and flung it to the other side of the top floor, and the moment that it crashed into the wall, I heard two heavy footsteps one aisle over and to my left.

  The footsteps stopped almost as soon as they started.

  “Nice try,” Isaac laughed, and then he didn’t move again. “You obviously know what I am, so why don’t you just--”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his question. While he had been talking, I had moved down the aisle right behind him, so there was only one set of shelves in between Nat’s brother and me. I followed the sound of his voice and started to scan the open spaces between books, but it had only taken me a handful of seconds to spot Isaac on the next aisle.

  And as soon as I saw him, I pressed the end of my Louisville slugger up against a row of books and shoved it toward his kidneys when he was mid-sentence.

  The books clattered to the floor, but my bat only grazed Isaac’s lower back before he reacted in time and twisted away. He was even faster than I had anticipated, but at least it had given me a chance to see his reaction time.

  I wanted to know exactly what I was up against, and based on how quickly he had moved just now, I guessed that he was at least as strong as me, if not stronger.

  Isaac flew around the corner and charged straight down the aisle toward me, just like I’d thought he would. He was about the same height as me, but he was bigger than I remembered, and I wondered if he had joined a gym or something since the last time that I’d seen him.

  He had a broad chest with muscles that looked like they had been fed by steroids as much as by human blood. His hair was the same chestnut-brown color as his sister’s, but while Natalie’s was long and wavy, Isaac’s was cropped short and close to his skull, and that meant I wouldn’t be able to grab onto it during a fight.

  But I didn’t have any more time to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses. Isaac was barreling down the aisle with his pointed teeth bared and his hands flung out to the side like an action figure, and I only had a second to pull the bat back before he reached me.

  My bat crashed into the side of his shoulder, but Isaac barely seemed to notice. Instead, he just grabbed the bat the moment it made contact with him, and then he tried to yank it out of my hands.

  “Now let’s hold on just a minute,” I said but didn’t release my grip on the slugger. “Don’t you want to know where your sister is? Or how I knew you were like me?”

  “I’m not fucking like you,” Isaac swore. “You’re fucking nothing compared to me.”

  “I don’t remember you being this much of a jackass before you got turned,” I sighed.

  Isaac gave one final tug on the bat before he seemed to realize that neither one of us would be able to rip it out of the other person’s hands. He let it go, held up his hands, and waited until I let the bat drop back down to my side.

  “Alright, truce,” Isaac said. “You wanna talk? Let’s talk.”

  For a second, I thought I might just attack him and try to finish him off as fast as I could, but I thought I might be able to lull him into a false sense of security first. And besides, I knew that Natalie would eventually want any information that I could get from him about what had happened since the apocalypse started. She might not want it right away, but one day, she would want to know everything about her brother’s last days.

  “So where’s Nat?” Isaac demanded. “Did you even bring her and her roommates here?”

  “Yeah, they’re… close by,” I said. “But I think you’ll probably understand why I don’t want to tell you their exact location just yet. I mean, you didn’t exactly tell us that you were a vamp.”

  “I wasn’t sure how she’d take it,” Isaac said as he licked his lips. “You know Nat. She’s such a worrier.”

  That was a flimsy lie, but I guessed that must have been the best that he could come up with on the spot. If he had actually been worried about how Natalie would take the news, he would have known it was okay the moment that I told him I was a vampire.

  “Why’d you get the vaccine?” I asked. “I thought you hated needles.”

  “The AIDS vaccine?” Isaac laughed. “Oh, I didn’t. At least, not at first.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “I do hate needles,” Natalie’s brother said, “so even though Brianna really wanted me to get one, I told her there was no way in hell that I would.”

  “Brianna-- is that your girlfriend?” I guessed and thought about the terrified blonde that he had tied up in the study room.

  “Yeah,” Isaac replied.

  “So then why d
id you end up getting the shot?” I asked.

  “When shit hit the fan and reports started coming in about vamps on the news, I figured out what was going on,” Isaac said with a shrug. “So I went to the campus health center, gave myself a triple dose of the shot, and then went to class like everything was normal. And, as it turned out, that shit worked pretty fast, too. I just can’t believe they didn’t cancel classes when people first started reporting all this.”

  “Wait,” I said as I felt my stomach tighten. “Are you trying to tell me that you… that you chose to be a vampire?”

  “Fuck, yeah,” Isaac laughed. “In this world, you’re either the vamp or the blood bag, you know what I mean? And I chose fucking right.”

  “That’s sick, man,” I said. “Don’t you want to be human?”

  “What did being human ever get me?” Isaac growled. “Now, I can take whatever I want, whenever I want it, and there’s not a single fucking person who can stop me.”

  “How were you planning to explain all that to Natalie?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” the muscular vamp said with a shrug, “and I don’t really care. I just wish that I had gotten the shot even sooner, like when Brianna first told me to.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve already caused enough damage?” I snarled as I thought of how devastated my girlfriend would be at what her brother had become.

  “Oh, I haven’t even gotten started,” Isaac laughed. “It’s just funny, you know.”

  “What’s that?” I asked between clenched teeth.

  “Oh, just that the vaccine was the best idea Brianna ever had,” the vampire replied, “and she’s such a dumb bitch that she didn’t even get the shot herself.”

  I raised my eyebrows as I felt my hand tighten around the baseball bat.

  “Oh, come on,” Isaac laughed again. “Don’t try to act like you’re any better than me, man.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call my girlfriend a dumb bitch, that’s for fucking sure,” I growled.

  “Hey, that’s just an observation,” Natalie’s brother said. “I call it like I see it, you know? She acts like a dumb bitch, so that’s what I call her. It’s not personal. We are gods now, everything else is just an offering to appease us.”

  “You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?” I smiled like it was all some great big joke, even as I felt my stomach tighten at this fucking asshole’s words.

  “Look, I’m sorry I sent my friend after you downstairs,” Isaac said. “But that doesn’t matter now. If he’s dead, fine. You and me, we can still work together.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked as my eyes scanned his posture to try to find any signs of weakness that I could use against him.

  “You’ve got four girls, and I’ve got two girls,” Natalie’s brother said. “Six should be more than enough for the two of us, right? We could share our resources.”

  I bristled at the thought that anyone would view the girls as just ‘resources.’ It was that same kind of mentality that made Kowalsky and the other vamp bosses think of humans as cattle that they could buy and trade and even slaughter, if they felt like it.

  “So where is your girlfriend?” I asked, just to see how he would respond. “Where’s Brianna? And where’s her friend?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” the muscular vamp said. “I’ve got them secured on one of the floors downstairs.”

  That lie was enough to tell me that he had no plans to actually work with me. But based on what he’d said so far and what he’d done to the girls in the study room, I knew that I would have rather killed him than had to work with him anyway.

  And that was exactly what I planned to do.

  “Got it,” I said, as if I believed his lie.

  “And, uh… where’s Nat?” Isaac demanded. “And where’s her roommates? I still don’t know how you got them here all the way from Brooklyn Heights.”

  “I told them to stay on the first floor, so I could come up and scope everything out first,” I said.

  “You told them?” Natalie’s brother grinned. “You must have those bitches really well-trained, if you didn’t have to tie them up, too.”

  “You know you’re talking about your sister, right?” I growled as I gauged the distance between the two of us.

  “Yeah, so?” Isaac laughed again. “All that shit doesn’t matter now that we’re in charge. I mean, it’s not like I care if you take some blood from my girlfriend. They’re all just blood bags-- who cares about any of the rest of it?”

  That was the last goddamn straw.

  I knew that if I just swung my bat, Isaac would see it coming in time to block it, and since I had already passed a number of vamps on campus, I didn’t want to shoot either of my guns and draw them all down on top of me.

  That left me with one good option, and that was to do something that this bloodsucker would never see coming.

  I jumped on top of him.

  As I launched myself through the air, I let my bat fall to the carpet so both my hands were free to tackle Isaac. I slammed into him with enough power to take him to the ground, but as soon as his back collided with the floor, he shoved me off before I could really get a good grip on him.

  I rolled away when he swung a heavy fist toward me, so his knuckles cracked into the floor instead of my face. He yelped at the pain, almost like his knuckles had broken instead of just cracked, but after only a second had passed, the muscular vamp flexed his fingers like they were as good as new, and then he started to push himself up onto his hands and knees.

  When Isaac had halfway pushed himself up, I jabbed my boot at his knee to keep him down long enough that I could scramble away and grab my slugger. He cursed under his breath, but the moment my fingers gripped the handle of the bat, I jumped into a crouch and pivoted around to face him.

  I adjusted my grip so I could take a good swing, but to my surprise, Isaac didn’t rush me. He just grinned, turned around, and fled in the opposite direction.

  Immediately, I launched into a full sprint and chased after him. I thought he might be headed for the two girls in the study room, but as soon as I sprinted around the corner of the bookshelves, I saw that Nat’s brother was halfway toward the stairs, and if I didn’t catch him in the next two seconds, we would have to fight on the stairs.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  I would have bet anything that this asshole really thought that I had brought Natalie and the other girls with me, and he was going to try to find them and hurt them before I could stop him.

  I sure as hell didn’t need another reason to be glad that I hadn’t brought the girls with me, but it really was one of the best decisions that I’d ever made. They were much better off barricaded in the back of the armored truck than they were here, and besides, I didn’t want Natalie to have to see or remember her brother like this.

  And I definitely didn’t want her to see me kill him.

  I pumped my arms to sprint even faster toward the stairwell, and just as Isaac made it to the top step, I raised my bat and shoved the end of it right between the other vamp’s shoulder blades. The metal cracked against Isaac’s spine and sent him flying forward down the stairs, but his head didn’t bust open on the landing below.

  Instead, he caught himself on his wrists about seven stairs down from the top, and even though I heard his bones all crunch together, he managed to roll forward and flip himself onto his feet by the time he made it to the landing.

  Isaac turned back toward me with a snarl. His hands hung awkwardly from his wrists, but he just shook them out until a few seconds later, they healed enough that he could clench his fingers into fists at his sides.

  “You’ll fucking pay for that,” Isaac growled.

  I was just glad that I had made him mad enough to forget about his planned trip downstairs for the moment. Since I had already scouted out the area and knew this floor better than the other ones, I wanted to keep him here on the top floor for as long as I could.r />
  Isaac bounded up the stairs toward me, and I tightened my grip on the Louisville slugger.

  “Two can play this game,” I said with a grin.

  I ducked back around the corner like I was headed for the two girls in the study room, but as soon as I was out of sight, I didn’t take another step forward. I just waited with my bat raised, while I listened to Isaac’s footsteps pound back up the stairs.

  The moment his head came into view, I bashed it in with my slugger.

  The bat cracked into his nasal bones, slid up the bridge of his nose, and smacked into his forehead. It rocked him backward, but he must have really been well-fed because the blow barely even slowed him down. He just shook his head like I’d sprayed him with water instead of hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and then before I could pull the slugger back for a second hit, Isaac grabbed the end of it and yanked me toward himself.

  I tried to pull my bat out of his grip, but he just tugged on it again, and I stumbled forward toward him. I dropped my left hand from the slugger, so I could use it to try to push off Isaac’s chest and try to keep some distance between us, but Natalie’s brother just opened his mouth wide enough for me to see his pointed canines, and then he tilted his head to the side like he was going to bite me.

  I slammed my open fist up into his bruised nose, and the cartilage folded like rubber under the force of my blow. I snatched my hand away from his face just before Isaac latched his canines into my wrist instead of my neck, and then I jabbed two fingers into his right eye.

  That was enough to make him release his grip on the bat, so as he clutched his injured eye, I finally jerked the Louisville slugger out of his grasp.

  “Don’t you think that’s all a little cannibalistic?” I asked as I tried to catch my breath. “Trying to bite one of your own kind, I mean?”

  “You’re not one of us,” Isaac snarled. “If you were, you’d share your fucking blood bags with me.”

  “There you go again with that phrase,” I said through clenched teeth. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you how not to be an asshole?”

  I couldn’t risk the use of my bat again. Isaac’s reflexes were too fast, and the slugger was just a little too slow for me to use it against him another time. The next time he latched onto it, he might actually be able to rip it away from me, and then I could be on the receiving end of a home run swing.