A vampire.
It was killing a vampire.
Nick paused his steps where he’d been starting to walk again across the wall, staring down in more detail at what was happening on the floor.
He saw the largest set of bones, what had been a T-Rex initially but which had clearly been altered by the living metal, close its jaws on another vampire. It ripped the body in half, letting out a disturbingly loud roar right before it bent down and crunched into another human-shaped body where it had been trying to run away.
Nick wasn’t sure that time until the monster lifted its head, the writhing body flailing its legs and arms in the creature’s mouth… then he knew.
The female the dinosaur was eating was moving too fast, struggling with too much force to be human. Her skin was too shockingly white, her blood too dark.
Like the first one had, the female vampire hissed, gripping the outside of the massive jaws as she tried to break free of its grip.
There was a loud… well, loud to Nick’s vampire ears… crunch.
The female vampire went limp.
Seeing the blood flowing down her neck and rapidly covering her middle section, Nick felt a roil of sickness hit his chest and gut.
NICK!
It was so loud, so immediate, Nick looked around, sure he’d heard her with his ears.
Once he turned, his mind jerked back to the present.
The dinosaur machines knew he was here. He’d seen them looking at him.
Now, a smaller set of dinosaur bones ran directly for him, its teeth and claws glinting in the overhead lights. It held out long arms, unfurling those unnaturally long claws, its bony, metallic mouth open to show its razor-sharp teeth coated in dark green metal…
Nick didn’t think.
He ran––not down but up, darting up the wall as fast as he could in the boots.
He ran at an angle upwards and forward, still aiming for the front of the hall.
He’d lost Wynter again… he couldn’t feel her… but that scream had come from somewhere up there, so he went where Charlie last told him to go.
The dinosaur switched direction under him, following him across the floor.
Nick had forgotten about the opening in the wall. Now that he was closer, he saw that the opening led to a side chamber of the main exhibit hall, divided by those giant red-granite pillars.
He reached that edge and didn’t think.
He leapt, catching hold of the first pillar in midair.
Sliding down the surface for a few feet before the boots kicked in, he frantically climbed higher when the dinosaur below him leapt up, snapping at his heels as he fought to pull them out of its reach.
He felt it, when the other creatures noticed.
Maybe the first one even called for help. Maybe the creatures communicated with one another in some way via their living metal. Or maybe Nick just moved too much, too dramatically, and they found him with their non-existent animal eyes.
That wasn’t quite right either, though.
That metal was nothing but eyes.
Nick turned his head, feeling stuck in slow-motion as he watched several of the creatures approach. He felt it before he saw it, before he heard it.
Some displacement of air.
Some difference in the light.
He watched that liquid metal morph over the surface of the bones, lengthening the teeth and claws, and he could feel the billions of eyes on the metal’s surface, could practically sense the intelligence there, the consciousness of the damned thing. He saw himself replicated and reflected there, as if seeing himself in the eyes of an enormous insect.
He leapt again, that time in pure terror, catching hold of the next column and slipping on the slick surface. He stayed only long enough to renew his balance and his grip, then leapt again, to a third pillar––
Right as the creature behind him lunged.
Nick scrambled around to the other side of the column, right as the dinosaur’s metal teeth slammed into the pillar, taking out a huge chunk of granite. Panicking again, Nick climbed straight up, keeping the pillar between himself and that massive bone and metal thing, what must have been a fully grown, adult T-Rex, about eighty-million years earlier.
He didn’t need to breathe, but Nick found himself panting as he hung there, near the ceiling now, and clinging to the top of the pillar. The dinosaur had taken another ragged chunk out of the granite, making another piece of it fall to the museum’s tile floor.
Nick climbed up to the ceiling, hanging down, and looked around in the dark alcove, now looking for doors, for any way out.
The dinosaur slammed into what remained of the pillar again, shuddering the stone, making pieces of the molding crumble and fall on Nick’s head where he crouched.
He glanced over the alcove, but the one emergency door he saw was blocked.
Whatever blocked the door looked to be made of some hard, heavy stone in a black, obelisk shape. In that fraction of a second Nick had to think, it struck him that someone had placed the stone there, and probably not anyone who worked at the museum.
This was a kill pen.
Someone had set this up, then unleashed these fucking things.
Even as he thought it, Nick saw eyes staring at him from the dark, human and vampire, wide in too-pale faces. There were others in there, hiding from these things.
The dinosaur slammed into the pillar again, and Nick’s attention snapped back.
He couldn’t stay here.
He’d bought himself a few minutes with the big dinosaur, but clearly, the damned thing was willing to take the whole building down to get to him. He could see the smaller one below, staring up with those bone and metal sockets, eerily silent and unmoving as it waited.
Nick fought to think, to decide his best course of action. He could leap to the next wall, hope the damned thing didn’t snatch him out of the air… or he could climb straight up, try to get across via the domed ceiling.
He still crouched there, thinking, when the T-Rex’s head appeared in the opening beside his column, only a few yards away. It tilted its head to stare up at him. Like the smaller dinosaur, it seemed to stare right through him, its eye sockets dead.
Then Nick saw the metal start to morph.
It flew off the bone of the head of the dinosaur, like a thick cloud of metallic green insects, and landed on the low ceiling about five feet above where Nick crouched.
It began running towards him like molten iron.
Nick let out a yelp of terror.
Then he was scrambling, running along the wall, half-sideways and half-upside down, aiming his boots for the museum entrance. He emerged out from the alcove and into the light and gasped, seeing a metallic tail headed straight for him.
He didn’t think, he dropped, even as that metal and bone tail slammed into the decorative ledge below the high, domed ceiling.
The impact shuddered the air, sending chunks of stone and cement raining down after him. Nick hit the floor and it rained down on his head and back, and for the first time, he realized he still somehow wore the hat that went with the tuxedo.
A chunk of stone and the fall knocked it off now, but it still provided him some bare protection, right before he darted off across the floor, now running faster than he ever had in his life.
On the plus side, the hall was mostly empty now.
Nothing got in his way as he streaked across the floor.
He felt and heard the metallic creatures take up pursuit and ran without thought, all-out, his body blurring even to his own eyes.
He was sure he was dead.
He’d seen that metal move.
He’d seen it streak across the stone, faster than thought.
They would chase him. Eventually, it would catch him.
Would it eat him? Or just crunch his bones and spit out his heart?
His mind scanned options, for any way out of this, any way that wouldn’t get him or any of his friends killed. He was still fighting to think
when he streaked past another set of granite columns, and found himself back in the lobby.
He entered the darker, candlelit space and skidded briefly to a stop, panting, although he didn’t need breath. He stared around, then, seeing no one, he started to run again, aiming for the exit… but he could already see up ahead with his vampire eyes.
The exits were blocked, just like they had been in the side chamber.
Black, obelisk-looking stones stood in front of each door.
When he got closer, Nick also saw chains wrapped around the handles of the old-fashioned doors, glinting with that green metal. Even if he had a prayer of breaking through that, he’d never do it before the creatures caught up with him.
He was fucked.
He was fucked… and now he was probably trapped.
He slowed his run a second time, his mind and eyes absorbing the reality of his situation. He was so focused on the front entrance, on how to get past those chains, he might have run right past them… if they hadn’t screamed so goddamned loud.
“NICK!”
Not one, but several familiar voices.
They all shrieked his name, banging on the walls like he was a buffalo they were trying to drive over a cliff to its death.
“NICK! NICK! OVER HERE, NICK! OVER HERE! NOW!”
Nick’s eyes shifted before his head.
He saw them at once, their faces reflecting in the candlelight that still illuminated the side walls of the lobby. They were in a dark alcove, shielded by a half-wall, which is why he hadn’t seen them.
The crazy fuckers were outside.
They were outside… on the floor of the lobby.
They were holding open a metal door.
His first reaction was to be furious.
That damned door wouldn’t protect them.
It wouldn’t protect any of them… not against this.
He also had no choice.
Given what they were doing, they had no choice anymore, either.
He shifted direction without thought, even as he caught movement in his eye, and glanced back towards the museum’s front doors.
Those obelisks blocking the doors, what he’d mistaken for “black stone,” were morphing and changing shape.
“FUCK!”
He darted away from them, watched in horror as they coiled and slithered, shining metallic green as they changed shape, moving with a sinuous, serpentine glide.
It was more of that living metal. They moved now, soundless, changing shape even as they left parts of themselves to guard the entrances, making sure there was no way in or out. Remembering the people he’d seen hiding in that side chamber of the great hall, Nick realized they were likely all dead by now––the vampires, at least.
All that ran through his mind as he ran for the security door and his insane friends.
He glanced back a last time, feeling like he was in slow motion as the black obelisks elongated… then flew apart into liquid particulates, like he’d seen them do around the bones of the T-Rex’s massive head.
He continued to watch and run as they re-shaped themselves with disturbing speed, but not into liquid metal this time.
Instead, they looked almost like humanoid forms.
One of them took a step in his direction, even as it continued to morph and change.
Fear exploded in Nick’s chest and head.
It was one of the creatures from Malek’s painting.
Nick forgot his annoyance with his friends.
He forgot how unlikely that door was to hold them.
He put a final, desperate burst of speed into his limbs and streaked the last few yards to the staircase he could see on the other side.
He heard a gun go off.
His eyes shifted away from where a uniformed security guard held open the door next to Kit and Morley… and saw Jordan firing at the approaching metal men.
He wanted to yell at him not to waste his time, that bullets wouldn’t do shit against those things, but he didn’t bother. Instead he grabbed his friend as he ran past, dragging Jordan with one arm and Morley with the other, bringing them inside the door with him.
He was barely inside the threshold when he released them both.
Without a pause, he turned back to the door, darting towards the security guard who was pulling it closed––agonizingly slow, from Nick’s perspective.
He shoved the guard out of the way.
Gripping the metal bar on the inside the door, Nick slammed the damned thing shut with a resounding clang. Even as he did, he glimpsed the creatures through the dim opening. He saw the dark-green shapes, saw them morphing, bleeding, their metal gleaming as they lumbered towards the security door, looking even more alive as those insect-like men than they had as dinosaurs.
In that brief glimpse of seeing them, shuffling through the dark, Nick could only think one thing.
He was fucked.
And now all his friends were fucked with him.
His girlfriend was fucked with him.
The door caught in that half-instant, banging into the wall.
For a long-feeling handful of seconds, there was silence.
Chapter 31
Bunker
Nick broke that silence first.
Gripping the metal bar on the door, he ripped it out of its socket on the side furthest from the lock. The metal screeched as he twisted it up and over so that it bent around the door handle and across the door frame, essentially blocking it from opening.
“It had a lock,” the guard protested. “It locked automatically––”
“Well, now it has this, too,” Nick growled, turning to face him.
He glanced at the guard just long enough to see his pale face, his wide eyes as he stared at Nick’s. It might have been humorous, in other circumstances, that the human was afraid of him right now, but, given everything, it was profoundly annoying.
He looked at his friends.
Morley and Jordan stood just over a metal stairwell that descended into the dark, leading below the ground floor of the museum.
Both men were panting, holding their arms where Nick had grabbed them, staring at him in disbelief. For the first time, Nick noticed Kit was there, too; she must have been waiting inside the door. Now she stood behind Morley and Jordan, and lower down on the stairs.
Looking at her young, round, too-pale face, Nick wanted to snarl at her, ask her what the fuck she was doing up here at all.
That didn’t come out of his mouth, either, though.
“We have maybe a minute.” He glared around at all three of them, more or less ignoring the guard. “One minute, and those fucking things are getting through. Please tell me you have a safer place for us to go than right here.”
Kit swallowed, her eyes growing even wider.
Nick glared around at them a second time, his fangs fully extended, his vision tinted dark red.
“Please tell me we have a better plan than sitting here and waiting for that to happen,” he added, putting a touch of thrall into his voice.
A voice rose in the corridor.
It was shockingly young, but rang out clear and melodious in the stairwell, like it was made up of small bells hitting against the metal and cement.
“Come downstairs, Nick,” it said over the loudspeaker. “I’m not sure how my thing is going to work on those machine-animal things, or how far the field will have to extend… but I need you all to get out of the way.”
Nick frowned, staring up at the speaker and cameras he only now saw embedded over the door. Before he could say anything, that disturbingly young, calm, and oddly professional voice rose again.
“…and Ms. James is getting distracted with you there,” Tai added. “She really, really wants you to get out of there, so she can focus on the metal animals. I need her help, so I’d kind of like you to get out of there, too.”
Nick glanced at Morley at that, still frowning.
Returning his look, the old man shrugged.
From hi
s face, he didn’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole.
“Hurry,” Tai added, still with that unearthly calm. “They’re at the door now.”
Nick scowled.
Motioning to the other three with his head, he began descending the stairs, following after his friends when they turned to obey his prod.
Jordan was frowning now, still rubbing his arm, but he jog-walked down the cement stairs without protest, taking two at a time, and passing by Kit, as did the security guard who followed after him. Unlike Jordan, Morley reached where Kit stood and prodded her arm to walk ahead. When she didn’t move, or take her eyes off Nick, the old man walked around and past her, moving faster than Nick had ever seen him move.
As for Kit herself, she continued to stare up at Nick, long enough for him to get annoyed with her being there all over again.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he grumbled at her, reaching where she was on the stairs. “And what the fuck are you doing right now, standing there? Walk. Now, kid. Or I’ll drag you down the stairs myself.”
She blinked at that.
Then she blinked again.
Nick saw recognition replace some of the shock in her features… enough of it that he realized she’d half-blanked on who he was, on Nick himself. She did that sometimes, when he went full vampire. It was like, until he actually spoke to her with his red eyes and extended fangs, she didn’t see him, or maybe just didn’t recognize him.
Then he’d remind her, and she snapped back.
Blinking a third time, she snapped back now.
He saw her eyes focus on his, right before she frowned, giving him a full-blown incredulous look. Then she smacked him in the chest.
It didn’t hurt, because… vampire.
But she hit him full-strength.
“You’re an asshole,” she informed him, scowling.
“Walk, you little creep,” he shot back. “Walk. Walk. Walk. If you want to yell at me, do it while you move those little stick legs of yours.”
Her scowl deepened. “Stick legs, my ass.”
She started to walk, though.
She walked fast, breaking into a half-jog and gripping the railing for balance. At the same time, she took his advice and grumbled at him as she went down.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 29