by S. L. Eaves
What I am figuring for a server room is anything but. The door is open and it’s dark inside except for the blue glow from the refrigerators. I flick up the light switch by the door. Florescent beams slowly blink to life. I circle the room trying to figure out what I’m staring at.
Through the glass doors I can see vials filled with what appears to be a pretty impressive variety of substances. Most are labeled with words I’m a doctoral degree or two shy of comprehending. I stop when I get to a fridge with a substance I recognize. Blood, lots of it.
The flimsy padlock does not put up a fight as I pry open the door. I take one of the smaller containers out, open it, and give it a sniff. It’s not human blood. Or werewolf. Or animal. Or demon. It smells the same way water smells to humans—odorless. I’m picking up nothing. Blood is never odorless. I dip my finger in and watch as the sticky substance drips off it just like blood.
I know blood when I see it. Or do I? Dare I try it? Worst case scenario, it’s some sort of poison. Can that even kill a vampire? I doubt it. Risk has to be minimal here. I lick my finger.
It’s blood. It tastes just like blood. Cold, which isn’t preferable, but human blood nonetheless. Odor or not, it quenches the thirst, which is the only test it needs to pass.
Vampirism is akin to drug addiction. We’re a slave to the thirst, a persistent craving. It’s constant, it consumes us and it controls us. A vampire will do anything to feed the addiction, for just a glimmer of that glorious euphoric high. When Striden & Deacon threatened our blood supply it made us desperate and dangerous. You don’t want to mess with a bunch of addicts, especially with the abilities we have. They learned that the hard way. With us, the drug always wins.
And as I look into the fridge I realize someone has discovered what they did wrong. Someone has found a way to create the thing we desire more than anything else on the planet. That someone being Brixton, I assume. She could use this to control us. I am sitting on a very powerful weapon. This is what Marcus is after. It’s not just about me. This right here, this is the big picture. Check mate.
There is a notebook on a small table by the refrigerators. An inventory list is jotted down on the first page. More words I can’t make heads or tails out of. Until I get to the bottom of the list: “Blood: Synthetic O+, A+”
I pull out my phone, hit talk, and whisper into the receiver when Rex answers, “Hey, I got something here.”
“Oh yeah? You take out those men?”
“Haven’t found them yet, but I’m inside an EVO storage room and I think I’m looking at a fridge full of synthetic blood. I mean, it tastes like human blood, but it’s not quite right. When Crina mentioned something about manufacturing blood I thought it was BS, a case of Brixton saying anything to win their favor. I mean, it’s never been successfully developed before right? If it existed you’d think we’d know about it. Yet here I am standing in front of a fridge full of it. It’s odorless, it doesn’t have that sweet smell human blood does, yet the taste is identical. And there’s an inventory list here that says it’s O and A positive.”
He whistles through his teeth. “No kidding? Wow.”
“Seriously, this could be huge for our kind.”
“Any Type O negative?”
“Maybe. There’s a lot to sort through here. Why?”
“Universal donor blood. If they wanted to capitalize on it, you’d think O neg would be their priority. Maybe they have other plans for it.”
“Yeah, like the kind that involves the undead.”
“Can you take some with you? Better yet, find the recipe?”
“Recipe?”
“Yeah, you know, like a formula or something to indicate how they make it? That would be a gold mine for us.”
I hear stifled arguing above me. The men are upstairs.
“I got to go, but I’ll do what I can to find a formula.”
I shut the phone, draw my gun, and head into the hall. I hear something crash and the sound of a scuffle. There is an exit sign above the door at the end of the hall directly to my left. I go to open it, find it locked and a card reader blinking back at me mockingly. I yank it open; I’ll set off the alarms. I think about how I blew the stealth mission a while back and drove the whole operation to shit. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but point is lesson learned. I sprint to the opposite end of the hall and hit the button for the elevator.
Again the elevator doors are met with uncomfortable silence. I spring out ready to put holes in every human in my path. Nothing. This is starting to get disappointing.
I make my way quickly down the hall. This floor has empty laboratories on the left and offices on the right. I can sense humans were here recently.
I spot movement to my right and enter the office gun first. The desk chair is still spinning, a lamp on the floor, an overturned filing cabinet. The aftermath of the struggle I just missed. Now what? Keep hunting? The computer by the office chair is on and I go over to see if there’s anything worth recovering.
After a moment of clicking on empty folder icons, I call Rex back.
“Get them?”
“Not yet. But I got a live computer here. Owner left in a hurry. If the men got him, they didn’t kill him here; no body or blood.”
“Okay, you got a flash drive on you?”
I fish it out of my pocket. “Yep, came prepared.”
“Good. Pull up the disk drives and copy over the content.”
I click around and find the screen with the hard drive icons.
“Hmm… It looks like it’s been wiped. Drives are empty.”
“I might be able to recover the data, but it’ll take too long to walk you through the process from here. How big is the hard drive? Can you take it with you?”
“Umm…” I’m staring at a monitor and a keyboard. I follow the cords to the tower under the desk. “There’s a box under the desk.”
I hear Rex laughing. “Okay, it’s inside the chassis. Pry open the motherboard and grab the hard drive.”
“Uh…” I slip my claws into the seam between the aluminum casings and rip it open. “Done. Well, the pry-open part, what am I looking at?”
“There should be a drive bay in front with an optical drive or a hard drive. Unless the computer was built a decade ago, the hard drive should be fairly small.”
I snap out a couple compact boxes that look important and pocket them.
“Thanks, Rex. What’s the ETA on Quinn and Dade?”
“They’re on their way, but I’d say at least ten minutes out.”
“Damn. Well, from the looks of things, these men are here to cover up whatever this scientist was working on…” I look around. “The person using this computer was clearly not happy about being interrupted.”
“You think he’s responsible for wiping his own hard drive? Maybe he’s destroying his own work or that of his colleagues?”
“That would be one explanation…I’m going to pursue.”
I tear down the hall to the stairwell, this time not worried about triggering the alarm. I’m still holding the open phone and can hear Rex’s objecting.
“Rex, they leave here unscathed, they become your problem tomorrow. Besides, it’s just two men.”
I shut the phone before he can talk me out of it. When I reach the door I yank it open and stumble backwards; it’s unlocked and I didn’t anticipate the lack of resistance. I bound up the steps and barrel through the access door to the roof. They could have descended the stairs and gone out the front door, but these guys like to be dramatic.
Sometimes I feel people with helicopters just look for excuses to use them. So my decision to sprint up the stairs rather than down is based solely on intuition…well, mostly; I do have some experience guiding me.
Not only are the men in black on the roof with a nervous man in plain clothes, but I can also hear a helicopter in the distance. Man, I’m good. Except that there are three men instead of two—Where did the third come from?—and with an armed copter arriving imminently
, I’m about to be significantly outnumbered.
The men turn to see who joined the party. One has the scientist pinned down on the edge of the roof, shaking him violently. It looks like they’ve been scuffling.
Good for him putting up a fight in a battle he’s already lost. I’d be impressed if it wasn’t such a hopeless scenario for him. The other soldier is standing over him, gun trained. The third is at the other end of the roof signaling the copter.
I can’t help but feel a twang of déjà vu.
All three have their backs to me initially. As they start to react to my sudden presence I sprint past; they’ll see a blur and feel a breeze as I dart by, but they won’t have a clear shot.
Without the least bit of hesitation I grab the scientist and spring off the roof, one hand wrapped around him, the other holding Xan’s prototype. I’d found a worthy situation to break it out.
I pull the trigger. What did Xan say? It hadn’t been tested in the field yet?
The rappelling gun fires a grappling hook equipped with a Kevlar and Spectra fiber cord the diameter of fishing line, but ten times as strong, or at least I hope. The gun is small and the hook that shoots out of it smaller, but its four prongs expand midair and it shows impressive range. It lands and firmly secures itself to the top of the building across the street: a mid-rise office building with plenty of glass windows to crash through.
The man I’m holding is screaming and clinging to me for dear life. We plummet for a few seconds, then the rappelling cord goes taut and we swing towards the glass-paneled office building. Well, Xan, I’ll be sure to report back with the test results.
With my left hand holding the rappelling gun and the man firmly holding me, I move my right hand to my side arm, pull it from the holster, and fire several shots through the scientist.
At close range, bullets slice through his body and effectively shatter the window behind him as we swing into it. He goes silent and limp, an instant dead weight, but inertia carries us both through the now opened window.
I am not the product of my environment, I am the consequence of it; a burden it’s more than happy to impart on the rest of the world. It renders me capable of making decisions someone with a conscience might wrestle with. At its most visceral, it’s survival.
He’d have been a dead weight metaphorically had I been forced to make my escape with him. And maybe alive he could share with us what he was working on, but that’s a stretch considering what we are. More importantly, it’s about what we aren’t.
As soon as I see the scene on the roof I know instantly he must have been extremely valuable to Brixton alive. Sorry to say, but his death is a check in the win column for us.
And now I’ve created a distraction as promised.
I let go of the rappelling gun as we hit the floor. The dead scientist successfully breaks my fall, but momentum sends me rolling across the room. My back slams into the steel leg of a desk and I’m brought to an abrupt stop. I really need to practice this jumping-off-buildings thing. I am no Spiderman.
There are four desks in the room. I peel myself out from under the one I just crashed into and scramble over to the scientist’s body. I check his pockets.
What was the man demanding from him on the roof? I heard him say “Hand it over.”
Bullets pepper the floor around the broken window and shatter the neighboring windowpanes. A bullet lands in my ankle as I drag the body between two desks for cover. I pat him down and victoriously remove a flash drive from his front pocket. Score.
More gunshots. The helicopter has arrived and is spraying the room. They will try to keep me pinned down until they can get men inside. I see a stack of business cards atop one of the desks and grab it. Time to call Rex.
“Hey Rex, got a good-news bad-news scenario to report. Good news is I got the scientist away from the men and I recovered a flash drive from him. Valuable stuff, I’m guessing, given all the fuss they are making about it. Oh, and I can confirm they’re Brixton’s men; the mercenaries I took out in Atlanta had the same gear on.”
“Is that the bad news?”
“Bad news is I’m taking heavy fire from a copter and could really use that backup right about now.”
“Right. Well, they’re just reaching the city, should be under five minutes…”
I read off the business card, “Tell them I’m in 1500 Regis Plaza, Suite 604, so 6th floor…but I’m not staying in this suite if I can help it; I’m a sitting duck here.”
“Take cover somewhere and let me know where you end up.”
“Roger that.”
I roll past the desks and out into the hallway. It is dark with a few dim lights illuminating the central stairwell, which forms a rectangular centerpiece in the hallway as it spirals down to the main lobby. There is a bank of elevators to the left. My ankle is refusing to work properly with a bullet lodged in the bone and walking is a struggle. I think about digging out the bullet, but I can’t find my switchblade. Oh right, Crina took it. I stumble back into the office, scanning the room for options; I really wish it was a few decades earlier when people had letter openers on their desks. Could use one right now. I think about going back to retrieve the rappelling gun; surely Xan made it retractable and reusable. It could come in handy to rappel up or down the stairwell. I hear voices. I’m out of time to decide.
Clumsily, I limp to the elevators only to discover them already in motion. The clip in my gun is down three shots from shooting out the window and I’m wishing I’d taken an extra firearm.
I position myself just far enough from the elevators that no matter which of the doors open I’ll have a clean shot, and just close enough that I’m not in range of fire from the stairwell above.
The men have about five floors to clear; they know I am somewhere in the middle, so they will be focusing their efforts south. The elevators are ascending. The helicopter probably carried the three from across the street, rooftop to rooftop, but then who is coming from street level?
Shit.
There’s a ding followed shortly by an “All clear” below me.
I ready myself. I can hear footsteps above me racing down the stairs. I don’t know who will arrive first.
Both sets of elevators doors open and four operatives step out. I get one head shot, a shoulder, then a couple ricochet off the mirrored walls of the elevator cars. This gets them to duck back inside the elevator for cover. I hear yelling and gun fire above me. A bullet grazes my leg. And that’s my cue.
I jump backwards over the railing, firing shots at the men in the elevator and into the railings above as I backflip into the center of the stairwell and plummet six stories.
It’s not a pleasant landing, but I manage to at least land on all fours, tucking my bad ankle in and using my knee and good foot to absorb most of the impact. Six stories is rough, but survivable. It takes me a second to fully recover and I have to roll to the side to get clear of the shots raining from above.
When I regain my footing, I stand, turn, and collide with Crina.
Yep, this day just keeps getting better.
She grabs me by my shirt and throws me across the room. I slide across the smooth linoleum.
When friction finally kicks in I grab the lobby desk and pull myself up, but she’s there to meet me and strike me down again. She’s wearing a weird-looking exoskeleton; from the tips of her fingers to her collarbone, it wraps around her shoulder and appears to be attached to her spine. She is strong to begin with; this thing just makes her ridiculous. I don’t even try to recover from the blow. My vision is blurry and I’m literally seeing stars.
“Where’s the scientist?”
“Dead. I killed him.”
“The fuck you do that for?”
“I’ve made a lot of bad decisions tonight. That was not one of them.”
“Marcus has branded you a traitor. Brixton wants you alive, but I don’t answer to her. Or any human.”
Is she trying to convince me or herself?
“Wa
it, so you haven’t turned her? Marcus hasn’t? That’s interesting.”
“That’s what you took from that?”
I am sitting up, rubbing my head. She looks down at me with savage, cruel eyes. It’s a strange feeling to look at someone you used to trust, considered a friend and ally, and see that in their eyes. Then I remember that’s just us. It’s how vampires regard all their victims. I shouldn’t take it personally.
“I’m no traitor. Fuck Marcus and fuck you for believing him.”
“You want those to be your last words?”
She’s hesitating. Crina isn’t much of a talker. She doesn’t typically waste time goading her prey. She’s looking for a reason not to drive a stake through my heart. So I give her one.
“He’s manipulating you, he’s in your head…the Crina I know is smarter than this. You want to kill me, fine. But know this—Marcus killed Dominique. I get that you’re pissed, that you feel betrayed, but I swear I’m not the one doing the betraying. I’m not the one filling your head with lies.”
Crina’s eyes go wide at the mention of Dominique’s name. I can see her struggling to process. And then it gets noisy behind her.
The mercenaries have caught up with us and we can hear footsteps descending the stairs.
“They with you?”
“Not exactly. They’re with Brixton.”
So are you.
“Right…well, I only got one or two; there’s at least five men about to join us in the lobby.”
“Marcus killed Dominique?”
I nod.
She draws her second gun. Shifts her focus to the stairwell.
“When I finish with them, we’re having this out. Don’t even try to run.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know the drill.”
The men are on her side. Technically. They freeze when they reach the lobby and see her standing poised for an attack.
“Change of plans, boys.”
The lobby erupts in gunfire.
I prop myself up against the desk and fire a few shots into the mess by the stairs.