The big, black SUV slowed and shimmied back and forth as Ledge pulled into the motel parking lot and came to a stop. “We rest here for the day.” Avery said.
“Then what?” Charlie asked.
“Tonight, we’ll travel back upstate to the Seraphim compound.”
“The what?”
“It’s a long story. Julia can fill you in on the finer points, but right now, Mr. Cutter, I’m a little uneasy about the prospect of being burned to dust in about thirty minutes if we don’t get inside.” Avery hopped out of the vehicle and stormed up the stairs to a room on the second floor. The same room they had taken shelter in the day before. Charlie eyed him with a cold stare. Julia could see his jaw muscles tightening as he sat, contemplating. She was worried he was going to lash out at one of them, but then he took a deep breath and got out of the vehicle behind her.
They were able to get their supplies into the motel room without any further incident. The door was barred shut and all was quiet. The vampires, her mother included, had wedged themselves into the bathroom to sleep, leaving Charlie and Julia to keep watch through the peepholes installed in the wood panels covering the windows.
Charlie was cleaning his M-16 at the small round table in the corner of the room. Julia sat on the bed next to the table, trying to decide how to start a conversation. He stopped and looked up at her. “Well? Are you going to say it or just sit there all day?”
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you were going to say.”
“I wasn’t… well…” She stumbled to get the words out of her mouth. “You and my mom met at the hospital? I mean, she entered your dream?”
“Yeah, and as far as I can tell, she saved my life. It’s hard to explain, but the things that were happening in my dream? Well, it felt like they were happening in real life. Like if I would’ve died in my dream, I’d be dead in real life, too. Scary.” He shook his head and returned to wiping dust out of the rifle’s trigger mechanism.
She continued her story. “You see, these vampires, they are in this special society. They call themselves Seraphim. They have this huge underground complex where there are hundreds of them. They recruited me because somehow, they knew that I could use my dreams to see things. Maybe my mom can do it, too.”
“Sure, seems that way.” Charlie agreed as he slapped the pieces of the rifle back together again. He got up from the table and began to rummage through a rucksack they had taken from the humvee. He pulled a few things out and threw them on the bed and then began putting other things inside it.
“What are you doing?” She asked.
“I’m leaving. Tell your mom I said good-bye.”
“Wait!” She hopped up from the bed and landed in front of him with the palm of her hand on his chest. As if I have any hope of stopping him if he really wants to go. She thought to herself. “You can’t go. We need your help.”
“The only help you need is a head shrink. Vampires are taking over the world and you want me to jump in with a bunch of them? Let them take me to a place where there are even more of them? That’s insane! Besides, I need to find my friend. She’s trapped in that city and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her rot in that place.”
He tried to move around her but she moved in front of him again, blocking his way. “Listen, they can help you. How are you going to find her yourself, huh? You going to go storming in there with guns blazing? Burn the whole place down till you find her?” She paused for dramatic effect, hoping she was getting her point across. It must have been working because he didn’t say anything. He just sighed and looked down at his boots. “The Seraphim helped me find my mom. Maybe they can help you find your friend. With any luck, we might be able to find my sister, too.”
“Julia, I’m sorry, but I already told you. Your sister’s gone.”
“But that’s just it.” She said. “I’m pretty sure she’s not.”
Chapter 27
She watched them leave their room and get inside the big black box that rumbled. She couldn’t be sure what drove her to this small group. She was drawn to them by something she couldn’t understand. Some inner knowing. She watched the black box rumble away. They weren’t the usual things she hunted in the night. Some of them were. But they felt different somehow. More like the one she had killed with her mind. The one that controlled the others. The one whose head she had exploded. A small smile creased her lips. Why did it feel good to destroy them? She couldn’t be sure.
But this group… This group was definitely different. One woman, the fiery woman with the red hair. She especially, seemed familiar. She knew the fiery woman somehow. She was sure of it.
She climbed down from the rooftop and went to investigate the room the group had left. The door was shut tight but she could still smell them. She had been right. She knew the fiery woman, knew her scent. She would wait here until the fiery woman returned.
But no sooner had she thought that then her ears perked up. She heard breathing in the distance. The breathing was nearby. They were trying hard not to be heard. She would sneak back up to the roof and stalk them from above.
She scurried up the nearest drain pipe and, in a few leaps, had reached the other side of the roof, above where she had heard the breathing. Even with her keen eyesight, they were well hidden. She continued to peer over the edge of the roof until she heard a soft pop and a distant whistle as though something were hurtling through the air at her. She reacted in time to knock it away but felt a stab of pain in her hand. Whatever it was had hit her in the hand and left a needle-sized hole in the meat of her thumb. Another pop, but this time she caught the tranquilizer dart and stared at it in disbelief.
In a cry of rage, she launched herself at the bush the dart had flown from. She heard another pop, but the third dart sailed over her head, missing the mark by mere inches. She hit the ground and rushed towards the bush.
When she burst through the bushes, the man with the gun was already running. He had a good lead on her, but threw the gun away so he could run faster. He was in a blind panic. She ran after him and a shot rang out, kicking up pavement near her feet, but she continued to run.
“No, Davis! We need her alive!” The man running away yelled.
The other man was climbing out of a second story window and sliding down a corrugated aluminum rooftop. He dropped off the roof and landed with a grunt. Raising his rifle, he ripped off a few more bullets. She had to dodge and roll to avoid them.
“No chance! I’m taking her out!” The man with the rifle began firing indiscriminately. She dove behind a car and heard the metallic plinks of the bullets spraying into the thin sheet metal of the automobile. She heard a few more shots and then the man’s gun made a funny sound. It sounded like the gun stopped in the middle of firing. She looked up from behind the car and saw the man wrestling with the gun, trying to pull some part of it back and failing. He glanced up at her nervously. She vaulted over the car and ran at him.
He threw the rifle down and drew a handgun from his hip and began firing again. The bullets whizzed past her. One skinned her leg and she faltered for a moment, stumbling. Then her shoulder felt like it had been hit by a sledgehammer and she fell back hard. She heard a metal clip hit the ground as the man was reloading. She tried to push up from the ground but her right arm was useless. She had to roll over to the other side and push up with her one good arm. She clawed to her feet and lunged at him just in time to knock the gun from his hand, but the man was quicker than she expected.
He slammed his fist into her face, knocking her off balance, then caught her in the ribs with a front kick. “Stevens! A little help here!” He yelled. She hopped back up and slashed at him with her nails.
The other man had found his weapon and came charging at her from the building he had run into. He fired again and again but was afraid to shoot too closely to his friend.
She grabbed the closest man by the throat and threw him at the charging man who dove out of the way. But he was barely getti
ng up from the ground when she was on him. He was able to plant his foot in her midsection and launch her overhead, then hop to his feet. Before she could get up, he was over her, slashing and jabbing with knives he had drawn from his belt.
She fell back, dodging, deflecting. The knives came at her over and over. She wanted to use her mind, to reach out to him, to cripple him, but the knives demanded her attention. One knife landed in her abdomen and stuck. The man lost his grip. The pain riddled her body but at least she had only one knife left to worry about. She gave her arm one powerful sweep and connected with the man’s forearm. She felt the crack of the bones in the man’s arm and he screamed, dropping the remaining knife. She reached back and poured all she had left into her arm, thrusting it through his chest. The man stood stunned, staring at her arm embedded in his chest.
“No!” The other man rushed at her. She heard a large boom and her knee exploded in pain and kicked out from underneath her. She toppled over, taking the dying man with her. The boom roared in her ears two more times, but the dying man’s body shielded her from the brunt of the shotgun’s blasts. She shoved the now dead man off of her and locked eyes with the man wielding the shotgun.
He stopped in his tracks. Now she could concentrate. Now he was hers. She could feel him. His rage, his fear. His anger was quickly draining away, leaving him with the stark realization of his imminent end. He grasped at his chest as she made his own diaphragm pressed up into his rib cage, crushing the air from his lungs. She concentrated more, sank deeper into his being and squeezed the life from his heart. She felt it strain to continue beating and finally stop. The man dropped to his knees and then fell face first onto the ground.
She released the psychic hold she had on the man and took a deep breath. The pain threatened to consume her, but she wouldn’t let it. Her left knee was now as useless as her right arm. She had to drag herself back across the street to the room that the fiery woman stayed in. The fiery woman would help her. And if the fiery woman never returned? Well, she’d be lucky to make it through the night anyway.
Chapter 28
A warm breeze blew by and brushed her long black curls across her face. She swept them away with one casual finger and smiled. It was him. It had to be him. Maggie bolted towards him at a full sprint. As she got closer, she could better make out his features. The rest of the world was a blur around her. She could have been in the middle of a battlefield for all she cared. It was Charlie. Without a doubt.
She wrapped her arms tightly around him and squeezed. “Oh, God, I was so worried!” She said, but he didn’t return her embrace. “Charlie?” She leaned back to look up at him. His eyes glared down at her, filled with rage. The sky had suddenly become black. No moon, no stars, just utter blackness. He snarled at her, revealing giant fangs. He grabbed her by the nape of the neck and lifted her like she was a child.
“Wake up!” He growled as he slammed her face into a brick wall that she hadn’t noticed a moment ago. She cried out as her ruined face came away from the wall. Pain flared through her cheek and her nose was most certainly broken. “Wake up!” He yelled and smashed her face into the wall again.
She sat up abruptly in her small bed and nearly cracked her head on the bunk above her where Gabrielle was quietly snoring. She felt her face to make sure it was intact. An icy sheen of sweat covered her from head to toe and she had to tell herself that the pain was in her mind before it would subside, but she was alright. Her heart was trying to jump out of her chest and her breath came in giant heaves, but she was okay. Tank was curled around her feet at the foot of her bed. Even in the relative darkness of the room, she could see the shape of his raised head staring at her. She wiped some of the sweat from her brow and crawled out of bed. Tank got out of bed and stretched, then leaned up against her, tail wagging.
“I think I need some air, Tank. You need to go out?” His ears perked up at the word. She threw on some clothes and Tank’s leash and stepped out into the hallway. It was deathly quiet and narrow. Small, square lights lined the length of the ceiling. They were spaced far enough apart that the hallway went from dark to light at regular intervals. The door out of the hallway was somewhere at the end. She knew it was there but the darkness swallowed everything. Where there were no lights, the darkness ruled with such ferocity that the light ended in hard lines. There were no shadows, only lightness and darkness. She moved down the corridor and opened the door at the end of the hallway.
The room on the other side of the door was a familiar one. It was the room she had first entered when she came to R.O.K. headquarters. A young man named Tim was sitting at one of the dozens of computers and listening to the chatter of a ham radio next to him. He smiled at her and then moved to adjust one of the many dials on the radio. “Graveyard shift, eh?” She asked as though the question really needed to be asked.
He nodded. “Vamps don’t sleep at night.” He said.
“Any news?” She asked. Of course, there had probably been plenty of news. Someone killed, more fighting at the kill zone, unrest in the city. But there was only one set of news she wondered about and Tim knew what she was asking.
He blew out his cheeks in a sigh. “Nope. Nothin’ about Charlie.”
She nodded and walked past him, Tank trotting happily by her side. She made another turn and entered the long cement tunnel that led to the sewer door. Individual light bulbs hung from the ceiling every ten feet or so and a myriad of cables and pipes ran the length of the tunnel. At the end, she saw the guard sitting in a chair next to the door. He stood up as she got closer and fumbled with the machine gun he was holding. He was a young man, no older than sixteen or seventeen. She knew him. “Hi, Matt.”
“Evening, Miss Stone.” He blushed. “Taking the big guy out to use the facilities?”
“Yea. You know how it is. When he’s gotta go, he’s gotta go.”
Matt smiled and turned to open the peep hole in the heavy door behind him. “Looks clear.” He said as he unlocked the giant chain that held the door shut with the ring of keys he had on his hip. He slid the door open and it gave a grinding screech in protest. “Let me check it first.” He said.
He was trying to act brave as he moved out into the sewer access tunnel but Maggie could see his hand shaking on the barrel of the gun. He swept left and right and then gave her the all-clear signal.
She stepped from the tunnel into an uneasy stillness in the access point. “Alright, buddy. Let’s get this over with.” She said to the dog. She hurried him to the edge of a platform where a set of steps led down to the main level of the sewer tunnel. The smell was nothing enjoyable, but it worked for what they were there for. A spot in the gravel had become a glorified litter box for Tank since she had taken up residence with the R.O.K. Revolution a few days ago. Tank was just finishing his business when they heard a shuffle from the darkness. He stopped and growled.
Matt, who had taken up a position on the platform just above them said, “What the hell was that?” But he barely got the words out before three silenced muzzle flashes popped from the darkness. Matt toppled like a house of cards and fell onto the tracks next to Maggie.
She screamed as Tank let out a growl and bolted towards the darkness on the other side of the tracks, his leash ripping from her hand. Three more pops came from the shadows and the big dog fell with a whimper. “No!” She screamed and threw herself onto him, protecting him with her own body. He didn’t move. “Leave him alone!” She screamed again.
Rough hands grabbed her and wrestled her free, slamming her face-down onto the gravel and pinning her hands behind her back. She felt what she thought was someone’s knee pressing down hard on the back of her neck while her hands were bound with a thick plastic tie. Tears welled in her eyes as she watched the body of her dog, her friend. He had saved her so many times she had lost count. She mumbled a quick prayer and hoped it would bring him back. But his big ribcage lay still, unmoving. She could see a thick river of black blood leaking from somewhere near his neck. The sounds
around her faded away as she began to cry. Her heart sounded like a tympani in her ears. The knee pinning her neck to the ground didn’t matter. The gravel grinding into her cheekbones didn’t matter. She hardly felt the pain anymore.
The pressure on her neck was suddenly released and she wormed her way towards Tank and pressed her face against him as she cried. With the sounds around her slowly returning she could hear two voices near her, whispering. In the distance, from the R.O.K. headquarters she guessed, she could hear yelling, screaming, gunfire.
Behind her, she heard a scuffle and a gurgling sound. Warm liquid spattered across her face and a flashlight clamored noisily to the ground next to her. Firm, powerful hands gripped her under her arms and lifted her as though she weighed nothing. Before she could understand what was happening, Ronald Kinder was cradling her in his arms and running.
He ran deep into the sewer access tunnel that now held God knows what. The wind whipped by, drying the tears on her face. She didn’t know how far they had gone down the tunnel when he stopped but she could no longer see the lights from the access door they had come through. He stood her up and reached behind her, either breaking or cutting the plastic tie that bound her hands, she couldn’t be sure. She rubbed at her sore wrists and looked around. A dim light near the ceiling of the tunnel blinked in and out but up and down the tunnel, she could see only blackness. “They’re killing them. We need to do something.” She spoke with a calm authority in her voice.
He took a long time to answer. “There’s nothing we can do. There are too many.”
“So, we die here instead? What’s the difference?”
“I have no intention of dying anytime soon, my dear.”
“Who were they?” Her tone sounding more accusatory than questioning.
Kinder sighed. “Government, I think. Trying to root out the opposition, no doubt. As if they didn’t have worse things to worry about than a few disgruntled citizens living underground.”
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