by Drew D'Amato
“Shit,” Vlad said. Could this whole plan be ruined because they had no idea how to pick a lock? None of the vampires had to learn this trick, their strength was enough to twist any lock.
“None of you know how to pick a lock do ya?” Vlad asked and they all answered with blank faces.
“Even if we knew, none of us have the tools on us to do it,” Jericho said.
My kingdom for a lockpick.
“Fuck this,” Michael said. He walked over and shot three shots around the knob of the door. He kicked the door open. “Who needs a lockpick when you have silenced guns.”
“Thank you Michael,” Vlad said as he entered the house.
He waited to hear any type of alarm. Nothing.
The inside of the house was more unique than the outside. Wide stairs were opposite the front door that led to the second floor. The floors were hard wood. No painting or decoration hung anywhere. But what was in the middle of the room had gotten the most of their attention.
A ten-foot gray stone gargoyle fountain stood in the middle of the first floor striking fear to those who viewed it for first time. The pool that the gargoyle stood in was made of stone. The location of the fountain wasn’t the only thing that made it strange. Instead of water, blood poured out of the gargoyle’s mouth, landing in the pool at its feet, then down the drain and of course back up some tubing and out of the mouth again, like how most regular fountains worked. The tubing system that held the blood kept the blood ice cold, so it would not clot. The eyes on the gargoyle bulged at them, and each wing was the size of its body, erected up like it was about to attack.
“Where should we go first?” Andrew asked.
“Don’t waste time upstairs. They wouldn’t risk it with the sun. Find the way downstairs.”
“Hold on a second,” Jericho said. He walked over to the fountain and scooped a handful of blood into his mouth.
“Jericho, what are you doing? We are humans now, that blood will just make you sick,” Vlad said.
“Actually it made me a little high,” he said wearing a curious look. He took another handful. “I don’t know Vlad, it feels like it’s working.” Jericho looked around. He was out of the light of the sun from the windows in the room. Jericho thought about it, and next he lifted off the ground. He was flying. “Drink up boys, we are still vampires.”
Malachi, Deacon, and Andrew rushed over to the fountain, and scooped the blood into their mouths like athletes rushing to a water-fountain. Only Vlad and Michael hesitated. Jericho flew down to the two of them.
“Why are you guys not drinking it up?” he asked.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Vlad said. “How can we be invited in? I know this is not just a myth. It has restricted me many times before over the years.”
“Yeah, it has happened to all of us, but it’s working now. Maybe it only works on humans and not other vampires? Maybe that’s the loophole to the rule. I don’t know, but I do know that that blood energizes and I just flew. So let’s drink up and get downstairs.”
Vlad and Michael both went to the blood. Michael, unlike Vlad, wasn’t confused as to why their powers were working. He hadn’t foreseen this, but he understood now why they were still vampires. There wasn’t a loophole to this rule. Radu was setting a trap, and when you set a trap for someone you wanted them to walk into it. They were not uninvited.
Michael slurped up the blood and played along. He just hoped Radu wouldn’t take Vlad’s forces for granted. They would not just be humans.
2
There are only two places nocturnal vampires can sleep during the day. One is an isolated box like a coffin. The other is in the dirt, feet first. The dirt is safer than coffins, otherwise Vlad and his men could have just bombed the house from the outside and be done with the Radusons. If the fire didn’t kill them, when they escaped outside the sun would.
The door to the basement was a thick, heavy, strong door located on the front wall of the house. Vlad was surprised to find this heavy door still pretty easy to open. There was no lock on it of any kind. Maybe they weren’t home, he wondered.
The stairs led down along the east wall away from the house. The stairs started off as wooden stairs and then became steps of strong stone for the last four steps. The stairs ended at the southeast corner of the basement. They made their way down, prepared for anything.
“Master, we are no longer under the house, are we?” Deacon asked.
“No, we are under the front lawn now. I expect this room to have a larger perimeter than the house itself.” Vlad answered.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. Michael found the light for the room and turned it on. They turned around and faced north and the basement/cave extended out in front of them.
The basement’s ceiling was about fifteen feet high. The room itself extended north, back toward under the house. Some tall blue rocks from seven to twelve feet high, shaped like teeth, stood up around the room. All over the floor sat little dimples of land about two feet in diameter. The Radusons slept in these dimples.
“Underneath those dimples is where they are. They’re sleeping,” Vlad said.
“Which one is Radu?” Jericho asked.
“I have no idea, there’s no dignity to sleeping in dirt. He could be in any of them, that’s why we have the silencers. It’s time to try and try again. Let’s get into groups of twos.”
Deacon went with Jericho, Malachi took Andrew under his wing, and Michael walked off with Vlad.
Vlad stopped at a random dimple. He and Michael got on their knees. Vlad reached his hand into the dirt and grabbed hold of something. Michael grabbed the handle of his gun. He wasn’t sure exactly what Gabriel and Radu were waiting for. Were they just gonna sit here and watch some of Radu’s men get killed? Vlad pulled his hand out. First to come were some strands of black hair and then a vampire, eyes closed, and not a thought to the world.
“Get him,” Vlad whispered. Michael pulled out his gun with the silencer and shot the vampire in the heart. The fledgling dissolved into nothing,
“Let’s move on,” Michael said.
Malachi and Andrew kneeled down to do the same thing. The vampire died also, another random Raduson.
“We could be here all day,” Malachi said.
“Well, we have all day,” Vlad said to him as he and Michael walked deeper into the basement.
The act became a game of grab bag; pull out a vampire, shoot him, and move on until you got the lucky one. Each pair of vampires wanted to be the group that wiped out the big guy, except for Michael. Michael’s mind was racing. What happened to Radu? Was this an even bigger trap and maybe Radu just didn’t care about these vampires dying—about Michael dying? Is this house maybe rigged with explosions, or something else as destructive?
Vlad and Michael pulled out a vampire already awake. It was Victor, one of Radu’s closest. He screamed at first as Vlad held a clump of his hair.
“Michael get him!” Vlad said.
Michael didn’t know what to do. Victor was awake. Was this part of the trap? His hesitation allowed the vampire to wail his hands as a form of a fight. He hit Vlad’s hand and his gun fell from him. Then he punched Michael in the stomach. As he keeled over from the blow something fell out of his jacket. Michael didn’t notice it. The vampire put his hands on the ground and popped out of the dirt, like someone getting out of a built-in pool at the shallow end. Before he could make an escape he reacted to being shot in the back and disappeared. Jericho lowered his smoking gun.
“Do I have to do everything for you?” Jericho said.
“He wasn’t sleeping,” Michael said more to himself than anyone else.
“Maybe he had sleep apnea, get back to work,” Vlad said.
Sweat started to form a thick film on Michael’s skin. Michael had his eyes on Vlad, but what if Jericho and Malahci pulled out Radu and killed him? It was only a matter of time until something had to happen. Either Radu killed Vlad or someone killed Radu. Until then, Michael was s
tuck in this limbo of having to play it cool. His stress would end soon enough, though. Vlad had discovered Radu.
At the north end of the cave, two blue rocks stood about ten feet up in the air. Between these two rocks, a silver coffin stood three feet in the air held up by two poles at each end.
“That’s got to be him,” Vlad said. Vlad and Michael started their approach.
3
Jericho and Deacon were about to pull out another vampire. As he bent down Jericho noticed something on the ground. He inspected it. It was Michael’s cell phone. He grabbed it and accidentally hit the SMS button. The last text was blank and sent to an unfamiliar number. The number started with 011—it was international. What was stranger was the time sent—9:09—right before they entered Radu’s house. Then he looked at the number after the 011—the country code number—it was 40.
40 was Romania!
4
Vlad and Michael got to the casket. It was a heavy casket but not too heavy for a vampire to open. Vlad started to flip open the top half of the casket. As the adrenaline surged through Vlad’s body, Michael’s nerves were worse. He knew something big was about to happen. The red velvet lined casket opened and there lay Radu, sleeping like a baby. He slept face-up and his hands over the opposite shoulder, like someone doing a pencil dive. He was in the nocturnal vampire’s deep rest; the action of the casket opening would not wake him up.
But is he really sleeping? Michael wondered. Did they get the days mixed up? If that is true then what did he do now? Did nocturnal vampires have to sleep during the day? Then why would Radu even agree to this plan?
No, he could be awake. The other vampire was up. The trap was set, they were invited in, but what was their plan? Vlad slowly put his gun over Radu’s chest, pointing it straight down over his heart. His right hand squeezed the handle and the left hand aimed the barrel. He didn’t rush it like he did with the other ones in the dirt. Either for the emotional reasons, or the sake that he did not want to screw up such a perfect chance, he took his time. Part of Vlad couldn’t believe he was actually doing this.
In that second Michael solved this riddle. Gabriel told Michael that if Vlad got too close, to take him out. This was his test. He wasn’t told that Radu wanted to kill him, just that he wanted to see Vlad die. What better seat would he have than right now, and the way Vlad would die—betrayal—what was a better way than that? This was Radu’s plan, but Michael had to act fast, he had to—
BANG!
Michael disappeared into nothing. Vlad turned instinctively to the shot, before killing Radu. He saw just the outline of Jericho in the darkness about ten yards back with a smoking gun in his right hand.
“IT’S A TRAP! KILL RADU NOW!”
Too late. Radu jumped out of the coffin and knocked Vlad’s gun out of his hand. Bullets started to fly from the opposite side of the room, and they did not come from a gun with a silencer on it. Gabriel had appeared out of God knows where, with an M-60 machine gun and fired at them. Andrew and Malachi ran to avoid the bullets and hid behind some blue rocks. Vlad got behind one of the two big rocks in front of the coffin. Jericho ran up behind the other one. Deacon was killed in the melee.
Gabriel hid behind a rock himself. Vlad’s men shot back at the small repeating fire, but it sounded like they were just hitting hard rock. The onslaught did not stop. Vampires shot out of the dimples like canisters up through a pneumatic tube. Most of them were armed.
“Fuck, I’m glad I brought this thing,” Malachi said as he took the Milkor MGL grenade launcher off his shoulder. He fired off three quick rounds, and in the small room it decimated a large portion of vampires, but they were still coming. He fired two more rounds in Gabriel’s direction but he just hit blue rocks. He didn’t kill Gabriel, but he got him to ease up on his shooting.
“Men, get up here,” Vlad yelled to Malachi and Andrew when there was a break in the action.
Malachi and Andrew ran behind the two large stones Jericho and Vlad were at.
“Where the fuck is Radu, no one went upstairs?” Malachi asked when he got behind the two stones.
“I don’t know,” Vlad said, and then the wall behind them slid open.
The four of them came face to face with Radu standing behind a glass wall. Andrew, Jericho, and Vlad fired with their M4s at the glass, but the bullets just bounced off it. It was bulletproof. Malachi was about to shoot his grenade launcher, when Jericho put his hand on the barrel of the gun to stop him.
“No, you shoot that, the grenade will bounce off the glass and come back at us,” Jericho said.
Radu smiled from behind the glass. “You see Vlad, thanks to your boy’s tip-off I was able to prepare for just such an emergency. I got my own panic room,” Radu said from behind the glass.
He then opened a slit in the glass about the height of his waist, two feet wide and six inches high. Radu moved to his side, away from the hole. When he moved away, they saw that Radu had stood in front of a large machine gun—an NSV. It was an anti-aircraft machine gun. The gun stood up on a tripod and Radu sat behind it. The space he had opened would allow the bullets of the gun to fire into the basement.
“We’re dead,” Jericho said, turning his head between Radu to the north of them, and Gabriel to their south. More vampires were getting out of the dimples. Jericho shot them with his M4 as they made their way out.
“We’d be dead if we were humans, but we have our powers,” Vlad said. “Men, push these two rocks down, transform into bats and make for the ceiling.”
“When?” Malachi asked.
Radu cocked back the large gun.
“Now!”
In a sudden move they pushed the rocks down and changed into bats. Radu opened fire and mowed down most of his own army, before he realized and stopped shooting.
“Gabriel, find them!” Radu ordered.
Gabriel moved his gun focused on the west side of the cave. It was the only place they could have gone. Radu could not aim his gun that far to the right, because of the small size of the hole in the glass. Gabriel scanned the room and then heard the sound of someone banging on the door to upstairs.
He looked up the stairs and saw Andrew trying to open the door. Radu had locked the door wirelessly from his panic room. It was now locked and made of titanium. Andrew would not be able to get past it. Gabriel fired upon him and he disappeared.
“Radu, I think they have the power to transform. No human has walked past me, but this fucker was up the stairs.”
Andrew had taken this risk for the sake of the team. It cost him his life.
“The rest of them are probably to my right, to the west, transformed into scared little bats,” Radu said.
More vampires got out of the dimples. The size of the army seemed endless. The Radusons moved toward the west wall. They made out a bat or two flapping its wings near the ceiling. Then one bat dropped to the ground and transformed into Malachi, who stood there holding the Milkor in his hands.
“Hahlo Sunshine,” he said in a bad English accent with a large smile.
He pressed the trigger and shot the last grenade in the gun toward the ceiling of the basement. The explosion rocked the roof. The front lawn above them caved in. Dirt, grass and debris fell everywhere. The hole reached right up to the panic room that was directly under the mansion proper. The sunlight affected the vampires like acid had just flooded the room. They disappeared within seconds.
Gabriel was trapped at the top of the stairs. If he left the stairs and went back into the basement, the sun would burn him. He was no longer a risk. There was now just Radu, alone in his panic room. The sunlight fell a few feet short of the window to this room. He watched Malachi climb up a blue rock and jump up to the opening of the large hole. He grabbed the ground above him and pulled himself out of the crater. Radu fired the NSV at Malachi as he climbed out, but he couldn’t get his aim that far right. He started to hit the glass and the bullets richocheted back inside the panic room. He stopped firing, afraid he would kill hims
elf.
Jericho climbed on the same blue rock Malachi had used to get out, and again Radu could not get his gun to aim far enough right in his direction. Jericho and Malachi were both standing on the front lawn. Vlad was already up there waiting for them.
“Master, how did you get up here so fast?” Jericho asked.
“I turned human as soon as the sunlight came in, and in the split second of transforming between bat and man, I was able to catch onto the edge of the crater and pull myself up.”
“You are quick.” Malachi said.
“Yes, now Malachi, do you have more grenades for that thing?”
Malachi reloaded the Milkor. Vlad took it, walked to the northernmost edge of the crater before the front of the house and dropped down.
Vlad landed next to the far left side of the glass for the panic room. The angle made it impossible for Radu to shoot the NSV at him. Vlad smiled. He walked over to the slit and stuck the barrel of the grenade launcher in it, keeping his body behind the glass. Radu’s eyes lit up in fear upon the realization of what he was about to do. He fired all six rounds inside the room. The room lit up with explosions and only what could be seen for a moment was fire and bright light. The blindness was temporary and when it died down the NSV was on fire, and the room was empty.
Nothing, he must be dead.
Vlad scanned the wall next to the glass looking for a way into the panic room. But panic rooms were designed exactly so that no one from the outside could get in. It was locked, and he could not enter. He had no way in, but there was no way out. A panic room did not have a panic room. Is Radu dead?
He turned back and walked into the main basement. There were no vampires anymore. He knew Gabriel had been on the stairs out of the sun. He went to the stairs and looked up. Nothing but the titanium door closed shut. He walked back to the dimples. If there were any vampires in there, they would still be there. The sunlight pouring in would not kill them, which was why they slept in the dirt. He stuck his hand in a few of them and each time he came out with the same thing—nothing. No more vampires anywhere. Radu is dead.