by Evan Currie
“Clear, ma’am!”
“Get on board.” She nodded in the direction of the chopper. “Lift off in five. Don’t forget your kits, boys.”
“You heard the lady,” Derek said, hefting his gear as he rose up. “Pack your shit and mount up.”
The three SEALs headed for the chopper while Judith turned back and joined Captain Tyke.
“Captain,” she said as she approached. “We’ll be heading out shortly.”
He nodded. “I heard. You’re joining them?”
“I have my orders,” she said, “and they don’t include sitting around your ship, Captain.”
“Well, good luck,” he told her, his eyes on the chopper for a moment before sliding over to the distant lights of Barrow. “I don’t pretend to know what’s going on here, but I have a feeling that I probably don’t want to. Captain…Judith, I have to ask, are you taking military personnel in against rioters?”
Judith’s face closed up. She knew why he was asking; more importantly she knew what he was really asking. The use of military personnel against American civilians was pretty strictly limited; however, a state of emergency had been declared, and a military presence had been authorized by the federal branch. Still, even though the legality of ordering men into Barrow in this situation was probably on the white side of gray, it was as good as putting a gun to the head of her career and squeezing the trigger if it got out.
That’s assuming that I’m right in my interpretation of the law, of which I’m far from certain.
Still, she thought about what she’d seen. The blood halo over the bodies in Barrow, the way Nelson’s attackers had torn into him with their teeth, and then the insanity of the attackers charging Masters as he held his ground with the only weapon of the bunch.
Whatever else they were, she was certain they were no rioters.
The question she didn’t have an answer to, however, was the important one.
Were they American citizens?
She just didn’t know.
Outwardly, however, she swallowed her doubts and looked evenly at Captain Tyke.
“No, Captain, we are most certainly not dealing with rioters.”
CHAPTER 15
This time, Masters made sure that his first drum was loaded with slugs, because while he would have much preferred the specialized grenades made for the AA-12, his order for those hadn’t arrived in time, and some heavy-hitting slugs would be a nice second best.
The bitch up on the catwalk didn’t even bother to move when he dropped a bead on her, putting the holographic sites square on her, center mass.
Arrogance.
The automatic shotgun roared its distinctive, fast series of “booms” and a three-slug burst opened the fight before any of their enemies could close even a quarter of the distance between them. He couldn’t have missed if he were drunk, not at this range, and each slug struck on target in a spray of blackened blood and necrotic flesh.
Masters hesitated for a moment as the figure stumbled back against the wall behind her. Is that it?
His question was answered when she regained her footing, shot him a glare he swore he could feel, then leapt off the catwalk and onto one of the generator buildings, disappearing from sight.
“That won’t work on her!” Norton snarled, scanning the room. “Save your ammo.”
“What the hell? I nailed her center mass!” Masters objected. “Those slugs should have blown her spine apart!”
“That’s not a drone, Hal,” Alex Norton snapped. “Taking her down is going to require a more personal touch.”
“What are you talking about?”
Norton didn’t answer, his eyes fixated on the first of the walking dead to approach them. He shook his head. “No time, Hawk. I’m going to need a boost.”
Masters’s eyes widened when his friend drew out a wicked-looking blade from under his black coat, retrieving a crucifix with his off hand. It seemed completely out of character for Norton to even bother with such a thing.
“Boost? What kind of…” Honestly, Masters was getting really tired of asking variations of “What are you talking about?” over and over again, but he couldn’t seem to come up with anything better.
Norton pointed straight up. “Boost.”
Masters looked up and realized what Norton meant, but at the same time he figured he must have misunderstood because the top of the generator housings had to be twenty-five to thirty feet high.
“I don’t think—” he started, then checked himself.
I need to learn to stop giving Alex that kind of opening.
“Leave the thinking to me, sailor boy,” Norton grinned at him, though his smile seemed strained. “Just give me the boost.”
Masters scowled, but let his AA-12 hang on its sling, pushing it behind his back. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Norton just kept grinning as he cleared some space between them, backing up just enough before nodding to his comrade. “Ready?”
Masters scowled, cupping his hands. “I still don’t see how this is possibly going to work.”
“I already told you,” Norton said as he charged, “leave the thinking to me!”
Masters caught Norton’s foot easily, accustomed as he was to doing this very same maneuver in training and in the field. In those cases, however, he was helping a teammate clear an obstacle of maybe twelve to fifteen feet. Thirty was insane.
Insanity never stopped Alexander “The Black” Norton, however, and he leapt straight into the air with the help of Masters’s heaving boost. Rising like a rocket, Norton vanished from sight over the top of the structure even as Masters reached behind his back to grab the AA-12.
If not for the enemy figures approaching from far too close, Masters would have been cursing up a storm and yelling at his friend for breaking the laws of physics. As it was, he just wished him luck and set about the job of clearing the room.
* * *
Alexander Norton landed lightly on the top of the generator enclosure, turning automatically to scan the room from his current position. His target wasn’t bothering to hide — she was standing on the very next enclosure, glaring in his direction.
“I suppose talking this through is out of the question?” he asked casually as he examined the battlefield.
A zero-generation vampire, no cover to speak of, and lots of ways to fall thirty feet and break every bone in my body. Yeah, this is looking just peachy.
“Talk? To you?” she demanded, her accent tugging at him. He almost recognized it, but couldn’t be certain. It was European, however, which at least made sense. Her voice was raspy though, which disguised it well enough that he couldn’t pin anything down. “Why would I do that?”
He was saved from the need to respond by her suddenly charging in his direction, effortlessly clearing the twenty-foot span between enclosures as she leapt at him.
Alex twisted out of the way of her attack, slashing with the blade in his right hand as she whizzed by. Black blood welled up where the knife passed, drawing a shocked screech from her as she stumbled on her landing, rolling to a stop. He moved to take advantage, but was too slow.
She went from her back to a crouch in the blink of an eye and met his charge with one of her own. Her hands flashed out as she closed the distance, clawed fingers slashing the air as he dropped and twisted under her strike. She still hooked his leather coat, tearing a chunk out of it and drawing blood along his arm before he hit the top of the enclosure and rolled clear.
Norton came back to his feet in a single motion, blade and cross raised in front of him as she paused and turned to look back at him.
Slowly she licked his blood off her claws, her grossly misshapen features twisting into a truly disturbing smile of pleasure.
“A wielder of the Arcane. I can taste the power in you.” She sneered at him. “It will not be enough to kill me.”
“We don’t call it that anymore,” Norton said. “You’re a little behind the times.”
; She moved so suddenly that she seemed to blur before his eyes, but he’d been expecting it all the same. Norton stepped into her claw strike, throwing his shoulder into her forearm to stop the blow as he pushed his left hand into her face, the cross hissing as it contacted her skin. She screamed, falling back from the smoking piece of wood, hands desperately rubbing where it had touched her.
He didn’t let up, following her retreat with an advance of his own, this time leading with a slash of his Bowie knife. The dull steel looked like something that could barely cut butter, but its edge held a telltale gleam. The vampire’s skin parted under the passing of the blade, the slice so clean that it took several seconds for the black blood to flow.
She hissed, grabbing her injured arm and jumping back.
“What manner of blade?…”
Norton smiled thinly, his eyes distinctly unamused. “Do you like it? It’s a Masterwork.”
She clearly didn’t understand what it meant, but then, he would have been surprised if she had. Masterworks weren’t common knowledge, even in the communities. Most craftsmen never created one in their lives, and almost no one managed to create two.
His Bowie had been crafted by a descendent of Jim Bowie himself, possibly the finest work she had ever made, and completely one of a kind. Almost nothing on either side of the veil was impervious to a Masterwork blade. Of the few things that were, vampires were most certainly not counted among their numbers.
The vampire snarled, shaking off the pain from her arm and face, and Norton brought both his weapons up as she began to circle him with a little more caution. He matched her, moving in the opposite direction as he tried to gauge any openings, his blade held out ahead of him as he kept the cross in his off hand, ready for a sneak attack.
Even as prepared as he was, however, he barely saw her move when she swept in the next time.
* * *
“This ain’t good, boss!” Rankin bitched as he lowered his M4 and started backing up.
Masters didn’t exactly blame him — he was moving back himself as the crowd of rotting figures stumbled in their direction. They had the same dead eyes shared by all of the vampires they’d seen this endless night, though most of them seemed to be in a marginally better state of composition.
Or is that decomposition? Masters wondered idly as he and the others slowly backed away from the leading edge of the almost literal wave of inhumanity moving toward them.
“Really?” he said aloud, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “I wonder whatever could have given you that idea?” Just because he didn’t blame Rankin for his concern didn’t mean he was going to let an opportunity to take a shot at his friend slip by.
“Hold your fire. Let them come in,” Masters ordered as he considered his options. While he had slugs loaded in his first drum, he was sure that his two Asatru allies mostly had double-aught buckshot in their weapons. While devastating at close range, buckshot was little more than an annoyance to normal humans past that, and he didn’t expect even a lucky shot to have an effect on these things.
“Eddie, you take the left side,” he said as he lifted his AA-12 to his shoulder. “I’ve got right. Canuck, GI Joe, take out any of them that get too close.”
The men nodded, arranging themselves in the corridor between the large generator enclosures as they readied themselves for battle.
Hannah huffed with irritation as she stood between them.
“This is pointless,” she mumbled, eyes flitting upward. “Our target is above us.”
“Unlike Alex,” Masters growled, “I can’t jump thirty feet into the air, and these things are clogging up the stairs. So while I agree with you in theory, there are practical limitations on what I can do about it. Stay between us, and we’ll cover you.”
He didn’t notice, but the two big Asatru exchanged glances and surreptitiously put a little more distance between themselves and the slim woman.
“I believe that you will find,” she said in a voice as cold as ice, “that I have no need of being…covered, by you or anyone.”
Masters glanced back over his shoulder, a retort on his lips, only to feel a chill he recognized from some of his earlier encounters with Norton and those who played far too much on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. Hannah’s eyes had turned from a chocolaty brown to an ice blue that was far too pure and brilliant to be natural, her expression so cold that he honestly worried that if it were directed at him he might get frostbite.
She wasn’t looking at him, however, no matter what her words might indicate — she was looking past him to the encroaching wave of inhumanity. Hannah reached up and placed her index and middle finger to her forehead before extending them out in front of her.
Perry grabbed Masters by the shoulder and pulled him out of the way just as she spoke.
“Freeze.”
The air seemed to literally congeal into a thick fog, lancing out from her fingers in a cone that intercepted the lead shambling figures. Masters stared, shocked into near immobility as the fog settled, slowly dispersing as flakes of frost drifted to the ground along the path Hannah had carved out. In the distance no less than four of the vampires, zombies, or whatever the hell they were slowed to a stop as a tinkling sound rose up over the ambient noise.
A sharp crack was next, and then the affected figures began to fall apart as they overbalanced and their legs were snapped off from the force. They hit the ground like glass statuettes, sending frozen shards scattering across the floor.
“Holy shi—” Rankin looked between the girl and the zombie shards, eyes wide as he seemed to reconsider where he should be aiming his rifle.
“Later,” Masters growled. “Stay focused.”
Rankin nodded, lifting his M4 to his shoulder as he drew a sight line on the closest figure. “Right. At least you didn’t tell me to stay frosty.”
Masters laughed as he looked through the optics of his AA-12 and stroked the trigger to send a Remington rifled slug down range, blowing bone and decomposing brain matter across the room. “Well, it’s a target-rich environment! Take ’em down!”
* * *
This sucks.
Alexander Norton was not having what one might call a good day. Actually, the more he thought on it, the more he was convinced that this whole week had sucked, and it was probably not an auspicious start to the winter season.
He was a sight more than passing fair with a blade; in fact, he could quite comfortably claim to a be a master. The creature he was facing at the moment, however, was fast enough and strong enough that he was far from certain that skill would win the day. Not skill with a blade at least.
Nursing bruised ribs, Alexander picked himself up off the roof of the enclosure where he’d been thrown. Leaping away from the strike had prevented him from suffering broken ribs, but he’d barely been able to nick the vampire in return.
Even as he got up, she was smirking at him with a grin as infuriating as it was disturbing.
“Poor little Arcanus. Can’t quite get your power…up?” she asked, her voice laced with innuendo.
Alex shuddered. “If you don’t mind, could we just get on with the killing-each-other part? Sexual jokes from a walking corpse that smells like the ass end of hell really creep me out.”
The vampiress snarled, her expression changing from mildly taunting to horrifically twisted in an instant before she charged again.
Norton sidestepped, slashing his blade across her arm. It drew a line of black fluid across her outstretched limb, but she spun into the strike, and a blindingly fast backhand came in toward him.
He stepped into the blow, driving the cross into her shoulder with his off hand to soften it, but when the hit landed, it still sent sparkles of light through his vision. She hissed in pain, roaring as she slammed her arms down on the base of his neck in an ax-handle blow that drove him to the ground so hard that he bounced.
She stood over him, snarling as he lay there, then idly kicked away the cross and the knife before bending down an
d picking him up by the back of his neck with one hand.
“Arcanus. You were not meant to fight like gutter trash,” she hissed into his slumped face. “Why, I wonder, would you forsake the power you so obviously hold?”
Norton shook slightly, his laughter rising up over the sound of the generators. He slowly lifted his head and looked at her, causing her to hiss in surprise when she saw that his eyes were black within black.
“I don’t forsake my power, bitch,” he growled, his voice reverberating with barely constrained power. “I just know that power has a cost, but since you asked so nicely, here’s a taste of what I hold.”
Before she could react, he slammed his hands into her in a double-palm strike, and she was lifted clear off the ground. Her hands were torn from his clothes, and she was flung over fifty feet away, tumbling along the roof of the next generator enclosure. She scrambled to her feet as quickly as she could, but Norton was already on the move. He sprinted to the edge and leapt across the gap with arms outstretched, like a raptor diving.
He landed within a few feet of her, having cleared the twenty-foot gap with ease and then some before his feet touched down. She lifted her arms to defend herself against him, but was slammed into the ground by a single fist that drove her to the ground.
Norton followed up with a stomp to break her skull, but she rolled clear just before his boot cracked the cement. He chased after her, kicking out again and again, but she rolled clear each time. Norton found himself growing irritated, his anger rising with each missed strike, when his target suddenly rolled to a stop on her back and caught his boot as he brought it down.
Norton tried to wrench loose, but the vampire held on, grinning at him from her back.
“Impressive, Arcanus.” She laughed. “But you’re still fighting like gutter trash.”
She growled, twisting his foot hard and shoving it upward. To prevent his ankle from being ground into powder, Alex rolled with the power and was thrown up and around. He landed about forty feet away, near the edge, and shoulder-rolled back to his feet.