by Will Hill
From inside the house there came screams of terror and the rattle of panicked Spanish. Larissa leapt backwards, landing behind Tim; the squad leader was flanked by Jill Flaherty, the tall, powerful former NSA agent who served as his second-in-command, and Pete Rushton, a loud, relentlessly optimistic Californian who had served in Delta Force for almost a decade before being summoned to Nevada. Frost and Rios swung themselves around the shattered door frame and disappeared into the house, their rifles at their shoulders.
“Clear,” yelled Rios.
“Go,” bellowed Tim. Flaherty and Rushton ran through the empty doorway, their weapons drawn, overlapping Frost and Rios, who had already checked the corners and exits. Tim ran forward and Larissa followed him. A second later the squad regrouped in the middle of a vast entrance hall, a tight cluster of black, bristling with weapons.
“No welcome party,” said Rushton. “That’s just rude.”
Larissa smiled at him, her eyes full of heat.
“I want a fast sweep of this floor,” said Tim, ignoring his squad mate’s comment. “Room by room. No surprises.”
“Yes, sir,” said Flaherty. She stepped forward, her MP7 in one hand, her console in the other. On its screen was an architectural blueprint of the house they were standing in. “Three rooms in the centre of this level. Eighteen around the outer wall, sir.”
“Don’t we have a satellite overhead?” asked Larissa. “There’s no time for a twenty-one-room sweep.”
“I’ve requested sat coverage,” replied Tim. “Surveillance is telling me we’ll have overlook any minute. Until then, we’re on our own.”
“But twenty-one—”
“You heard me, Lieutenant Kinley,” said Tim. “We’ll just have to move quickly. Frost, take point.”
Anna Frost nodded, and walked silently across the wide entrance lobby to where a dark wooden door stood closed. She settled her HK416 against her shoulder as the rest of the squad formed up a short distance behind her, took a deep breath, then kicked the door open, darting back behind the cover of the wall as it swung on its hinges. There was no movement inside the room, no rattle of gunfire. Frost checked over her shoulder for confirmation and saw Tim pointing a finger silently towards the open door. She nodded and stepped noiselessly into the room. As she did so, Larissa heard something, something inaudible to anyone without her supernatural hearing.
A tiny inhalation of breath.
“Wait!” she yelled.
But she was too late.
As Frost stepped into the room, something silver whistled out from behind the door and crashed into the side of her helmet, sending sparks flying into the air and driving her to her knees. She twisted as she buckled, pulling the trigger on her HK416 instinctively. Fire burst from the end of the barrel as the rifle thundered deafeningly in the enclosed space of the house.
“Move!” yelled Tim Albertsson, and ran forward.
Larissa beat him to it. She blurred through the space between where she was standing and where Frost was lying on the floor, and scooped the Operator easily into the air with one hand, drawing her T-Bone with the other. She pushed Frost behind her, pointed her weapon into the space behind the door, and froze.
Slumped on the ground was a woman, no older than twenty or twenty-one. She was wearing an orange bikini, and bleeding from at least a dozen bullet wounds. Crimson covered the wall and pooled on the ground beneath her. Resting limply in one of her hands was a long machete. Her eyes were wide and staring, devoid of life.
The rest of the Special Operations Squad burst into the room, their weapons drawn, skidding to a halt as they followed Larissa’s gaze.
“Christ,” said Flaherty. “What the hell is this?”
“Anna,” said Tim, taking hold of the Canadian’s shoulders. “Are you hurt?”
Larissa released her grip. Frost staggered slightly, but managed to stay upright.
“I’m OK,” she said. “Stupid of me. I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s OK,” replied Tim. “You’re all right.”
“Sir,” said Flaherty, and Tim turned towards her. “This girl wasn’t a vampire. She’s human, sir.”
Anna Frost pushed back her visor. “Human?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
“Human,” confirmed Flaherty. She was crouched beside the dead girl, running the beam from her UV torch over her skin.
“She’s dead?” asked Frost. “I killed her?”
Tim turned sharply back to face her. “She attacked you, Operator. Remember that. You did your job.”
Frost nodded, but the sickly grey-green colour of her face suggested that she was far from convinced. Larissa stared helplessly at her, then heard something else, from beyond the closed door at the far end of the room. It was a soft scratching sound, like bare feet shuffling across wooden floorboards.
“We’re about to have company,” she whispered.
Tim took one look at the expression on her face and ordered his squad to take cover. Rushton pulled Frost and Flaherty down behind a huge leather sofa that sat in the middle of the room, as Tim and Rios took cover behind a heavy wooden desk beneath the window. Larissa floated silently up into the air, spreading herself easily against the ceiling, and trained her T-Bone down at the closed door.
There was a long, pregnant silence. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound, until Larissa heard a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the door, a millisecond before it was kicked open.
It slammed against the wall with a deafening crash as a stream of figures burst through the empty space, screaming and yelling and waving their hands above their heads, hands that were full of metal.
“Freeze!” bellowed Tim Albertsson, rising up from behind the desk, his rifle locked against his shoulder. The rest of the squad rose as one, their weapons pointed at the mass of screaming humanity, which stopped dead at the sight of the black-clad figures before them.
Standing inside the doorway were seven women in bikinis. The oldest appeared to be in her late twenties, and several appeared to be little more than teenagers. In their hands they carried an array of kitchen knives, machetes, and other sharp pieces of household metal; one girl was carrying a garden trowel.
“Drop the weapons!” shouted Tim Albertsson. “Drop them now!”
The women instantly threw what they were holding to the ground; the makeshift weapons clattered against the floorboards, one of the knives digging into the wood and vibrating. They wore expressions of fear and misery on their faces, and several of them clutched at their almost naked bodies, covering their chests and crotches to the best of their ability. At the front, a tall, dark-skinned woman stared at the black figures, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. She looked as though she was about to speak when her eyes flicked to the corner of the room and what lay there. Her hands flew to her mouth and she screamed through her fingers. She stumbled forward, until Rios yelled at her to stay still.
“Bastardo!” she cried. “Asesino! Olivia, mi pobrecita, mi querida ángel…”
Her voice trailed off in a paroxysm of sobbing.
“Tim,” said Larissa, speaking through the comms link that only their squad mates could hear. “Get hold of this. This is going to get out of hand quickly.”
Tim nodded, then turned his attention back to the women, all of whom were now in tears, trembling and shaking and pointing at the dead girl. “Ladies,” he said. “Identify yourselves.”
The girl who had screamed stared at him with open loathing. “I am Eva,” she spat.
“Eva,” said Tim. “Can I talk to you? Can we talk calmly?”
“I do not talk with murderers,” said Eva. “With cowards.”
“She attacked me,” said Frost, her voice low. “I was defending myself.”
“With your gun and your helmet and your armour,” said Eva, looking at Frost with open contempt. “She had a piece of metal that wasn’t even sharp. How much of a threat was she to you?”
“Eva, look at me,” said Tim. Behind her, the rest of the women
were beginning to mutter in Spanish, and he was keen to try and neutralise the situation. If they attacked, his squad would be in no real danger. But he knew that not all of the women would survive if his team were forced to defend themselves; possibly none of them would.
“Why are you here, Eva?” he asked. “Why are you all here, in this house?”
She looked at him for a long moment. “We cut,” she said, eventually.
“Cut what?”
“The product,” she said. “In the basement. We cut and wrap and parcel.”
“Why are you dressed like that?” asked Larissa.
One of the younger-looking girls spoke up. “So we not steal,” she said, her voice wavering. “They no trust us.”
Jesus Christ, thought Larissa. How humiliating.
“And because they like to look,” said Eva. “The men. They like to look.” Behind her, the rest of the women murmured their agreement.
“Why are you up here on your own?” asked Tim. “Where is General Rejon?”
“Downstairs,” replied Eva. “When the shooting start, he sent us up here. Told us to fight.”
“Does he know who we are?” asked Tim. “Why we’re here?”
Eva shook her head. “General thinks you are from other cartel.” She examined their uniforms. “But I am thinking not.”
“So he sent you all up here with lumps of metal to fight with?” asked Larissa, her voice vibrating with fury. “Dressed in nothing? After he had heard with his own ears that whoever was up here had guns?”
Eva shrugged. “It not matter if we die. There are eight of us cutters, seven now, after Olivia. We all die, tomorrow a hundred girls ask for jobs. If we say no, we will not fight, the General will kill us himself. So we fight.”
“No, you don’t,” said Tim. “You take your friend’s body and you find some clothes and you get the hell out of here as quickly as you can. Do you understand me, Eva?”
“What we tell General tomorrow?” asked one of the women, her face a mask of worry. “How we explain?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” said Tim. “Eva, you said General Rejon is downstairs?”
She nodded.
“That’s dumb,” said Flaherty, frowning. “There’s only one entrance to the lower level. Next door, in the library.”
“The General will not run,” said Eva. “He told us he will not go back to prison. He will die first.”
“Then let’s give him what he wants,” spat Larissa. “Why are we standing around up here when they’re down there?”
“How many of them are downstairs?” asked Tim, shooting a glance full of warning at Larissa.
“Eleven including the General.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Eva?”
“Yes.”
“She’s telling the truth, sir,” said Flaherty. “We just got overlook. Twelve humans and one vampire on this level, eleven vampires downstairs.”
“Good,” said Tim. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, great,” said Larissa. “Pity we didn’t have that information before we killed an innocent girl.”
“Larissa?” said Tim, softly.
“What?”
“Shut the hell up. That’s an order.”
Larissa stared at her squad leader for a long moment.
It’s not his fault, she told herself. Not anyone’s fault. Bad things happen. Bad things happen.
“Yes, sir,” she said, without dropping her gaze.
“Thank you,” said Tim, and returned his attention to Eva. “The General and his men. What weapons do they have?”
“Knives,” said Eva. “And guns. Many, many guns.”
The Special Operations Squad stood in General Rejon’s library, facing the door that would take them down to the building’s basement level. The room was dark, with a wooden floor and ceiling-height bookshelves covering three of the walls. The fourth was dominated by a vast picture window, which looked out over the sloping gardens and grounds towards the distant front gates, a view that would normally have been idyllic, but which was now dotted with patches of spilled blood, still visible in the last of the evening light.
Eva had led the terrified, grief-stricken cutters out of the house, two of them carrying the body of the woman named Olivia between them. They had gone without a word, although Frost had been unable to meet any of their eyes as they departed; her face was pale and drawn.
“Anna,” said Tim. “I want you guarding this door. Anything comes up the stairs that isn’t one of us, kill it.”
“I’m fine, sir,” she said. “You don’t need to leave me up here.”
“I know,” replied Tim. “But I need this door covered and I want you to do it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Frost. Her face wore an expression of abject misery.
“The rest of us are going down there,” said Tim, nodding towards the door. “There are eleven vampires waiting for us, none of whom the world is going to miss. I want visors down and weapons ready. Let’s get this done and go home. José, you’re on point.”
Rios nodded and walked across to the door; he kicked it open and leapt backwards, creating separation between himself and the empty space. The satellite imagery indicated that all eleven of the vampires were in one place, a long room in the centre of the basement, but it was impossible to be too careful when you were dealing with vampires.
“Clear,” said Rios. He stepped through the door and started down the stairs towards the basement. Larissa watched as Flaherty and Rushton followed him, her stomach churning with boiling acid, her eyes burning with a heat she had never felt before.
She was angrier than she had ever been in her life.
The opulence of the house and its grounds, the art and the cars and the fine decorations, were an insult to the overwhelming majority of human beings, the men and women who scraped by and tried to live decent lives. The house was a palace built on death and misery, on the expendability of men and women like Olivia, who had attacked a soldier wearing only a bikini and carrying a dull machete because her employer had promised to kill her if she didn’t.
All their money and their guns aren’t going to help them now, she thought, her mind so flooded with the bittersweet desire to commit violence that she could barely form the words.
Nothing can help them now.
They went silently, taking the stairs one at a time, and emerged into a wood-panelled corridor.
The long wall to their left was covered in framed posters of old Hollywood films: Tarzan, The Adventures of Robin Hood, King Kong, The Magnificent Seven. To their right, the wall was covered with black and white photographs of film stars, politicians, musicians and models. A handsome man sporting a thick moustache and wearing military uniform smiled out from the middle of every frame; the man who was no longer a man, the vampire the Special Operations Squad was there to destroy.
“Flaherty,” said Tim, across their comms network. “Do we still have overlook?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“Talk us through the layout of this level.”
“One room to our left,” said Flaherty, pointing at a door set in between two of the posters. “To the right, there’s one large room on the other side of this wall. Small rooms along the edges, but the central space is open. The vamps are gathered at the far end.”
“OK,” said Tim. “Stay on it. Let me know if they move.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Flaherty.
The squad leader raised his hand and pointed at the door set into the left-hand wall. Rios and Rushton moved silently along the corridor until they were standing either side of it. Tim and Flaherty moved up behind them, their T-Bones raised to their shoulders, Larissa watching their backs. There was a moment of silence before Rios reached down, gripped the handle, and threw the door open. Tim led them in, Flaherty behind him, Rios, Rushton and Larissa bringing up the rear.
The room was long and wide, full of metal benches beside which stood a number of stools. On the bench
tops sat plastic tubs full of white powder, along with metal spoons, wooden sticks, and a pair of ancient-looking scales. A set of shelves contained rows of rectangular parcels, wrapped in brown paper and layers of clear plastic. A digital radio was plugged into a wall socket in the corner, the single concession to levity in this severe, businesslike room.
“This is where those women worked,” said Larissa. “The cutters.”
Tim nodded. “Set a UV grenade on that bench,” he said. “Motion sensitive. I don’t want any surprises down here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Larissa. She pulled a UV grenade from her belt, placed it in the middle of one of the piles of powder, and twisted its dial three clicks to the right; it began to flash steadily as the squad made their exit. Larissa cast a final glance into the room as she pulled the door closed and felt the fury in her chest, hot and sharp and comforting.
Time’s almost up, General, she thought. I’m going to carve Olivia’s name into your heart before I crush it with my bare hands.
They regrouped in the corridor, their weapons raised.
“Overlook?” asked Tim.
“No change,” said Flaherty.
“OK. Once we go round this wall, is there anything between us and them?”
“Structural pillars,” said Flaherty. “Furniture. Tables and sofas by the look of it.”
“All right. I want an even spacing as we move up. Once we engage, Jill and Larissa break right, Pete and José to the left with me. Clear?”
Rushton and Rios nodded.
“Let’s do this quick and clean,” said Tim. “Remember that these are not the same vampires we’re used to dealing with; they’re stronger, and faster, and most of them have military experience. Get them in your sights and put them down. Don’t let yourself get cut off, and fall back if you find yourself in a changing situation. This is no time for heroics. Are you listening to me, Larissa?”
She grunted and nodded her head. Fire was coursing through her veins, demanding violence, urging her to spill blood and tear flesh.