Darkest Hour

by Rob Cornell

  Kate opened the door.

  The blare of car horns sent her heart into a mad rattle in her chest. The city smells—rotten trash, exhaust, a hotdog stand—blasted her, almost as harsh as the traffic noise. She recognized the view before her, but couldn’t reconcile it in her mind with the hallway stretching behind her. This was the view from the front door of her apartment building in New York.

  People walked by on the sidewalk under the streetlights without any reaction to the woman at the top of the steps coming out of a hallway too long for the building she stood in, even those who glanced in her direction. But how could they not see...

  Kate looked over her shoulder and gasped.

  The hallway was gone. The doors had even changed. No sign of the place she had come from remained. She stood, by all evidence, in the doorway to the lobby of her apartment building.

  A woman hugging a paper shopping bag climbed the steps and pushed past Kate and into the building. Kate watched her walk to the elevator and hit the button to go up. The woman must have sensed Kate staring. She glanced in Kate’s direction, then averted her eyes and hugged her bag tighter.

  Finally, Kate stepped outside and let the door close behind her. She looked up and down the street and saw nothing to give her doubts she was back in New York, just another ordinary night in the Big Apple. Wherever Kress and his team lived, Kate knew it wasn’t in this city. All that grassland was probably part of the illusion as well. In any case, they had let her go home as promised. She was on her own.

  Time to find Jessie.

  The sharpest knife Kate owned she normally used for chopping vegetables. She sat on her couch with that knife on the coffee table in front of her. To sooth her nerves, she had Damien Rice playing on the used laptop she owned, the laptop speakers not doing Mr. Rice’s music justice, but it was all she could afford on a tight budget. Light reflected off the blade from the window. The apartment was otherwise dark.

  Kate gazed at the blade and could see a strip of her face mirrored back to her, could see the worry in her own eyes. She didn’t know what to do next. Just cut herself and think about Jessie? It seemed there should be more to it. Some kind of ritual. But she had performed no ritual to defend herself against Kress’s team. She hadn’t needed anything special to force Mica against the wall except the slice in her own arm.

  Yet Kress had been so ritualistic with her when he had “awoken her powers.” The room with the mural and the pentagram had some kind of significance. Hell, the pentagram had actually sucked the blood out of Kate to fill its grooves.

  Kate thought about Jessie’s experiments with magic after her discovery of her own power. All that cutting on herself had led to more meetings with the school counselor than any magical results. Only when Jessie became agitated emotionally did she seem to have an effect.

  Emotions had to be a component.

  Then again, Kress had appeared so cool and reserved during her awakening.

  That’s because he didn’t need his own emotion. He had yours. Your fear. Your pain.

  Her heartbeat quickened remembering the experience. She took a few deep breaths and focused on the music. No, wait. If she wanted this to somehow work, she shouldn’t try to calm down—she needed to rile herself up.

  So she focused on how she felt, naked on the marble floor, that hideous mural looming over her, the sudden slice in her flesh, the panic as the pentagram drew her blood out faster than her heart could pump it. The dizzying darkness right before death.

  She started hyperventilating. This was a bad idea. But now that she had let the images and feelings from that experience flow back, she couldn’t staunch them. They played again and again in her mind. She could even smell her own blood though she hadn’t cut herself yet.

  Her lungs squeezed. She swooned. The hyperventilating would make her pass out if she couldn’t regain control. She couldn’t waste this, though, either by passing out or trying to calm down.

  She snatched the knife off the coffee table and pressed the blade to her wrist.

  If this doesn’t work, you’ll either suffocate or bleed to death.

  No choice. If she couldn’t find Jessie, she didn’t want to live anyway.

  The blade cut through her flesh twice as easily as a head of lettuce. The blood flow was instant. The pain came a few seconds after the cut. The knife fell out of her hand and clattered to the floor, speckling the carpet with red.

  Kate dropped back against the couch and squeezed her eyes shut. Through the repeating imagery of her awakening, she brought to mind a picture of Jessie. She focused in on Jess’s face. A face she hadn’t seen in so long. Tears ran down Kate’s cheeks. What air she managed to draw tasted like iron for some reason.

  Jessie.

  The picture of Jessie in Kate’s mind wept. She moved her lips, but no sound came from her mouth, like a TV show on mute.

  Jessie, where are you?

  Kate tried to read her daughter’s lips, tried so hard to know what she was trying to say.

  Where are you, baby?

  A nauseating dizziness engulfed Kate. She bent forward and threw up. Cramps seized her sides as if her muscles meant to crush her ribs together. The acid taste of bile triggered a second round of heaving. Breathing was impossible. But she kept her eyes squeezed shut and her attention on the vision of Jessie, knowing any second now she was going to fall unconscious. She had to hear what Jessie was trying to tell her. If she couldn’t, she knew the magic would fail, which meant the bleeding wouldn’t stop, which meant Kate would die.

  I’m trying to listen, baby. Tell me again.

  Jessie’s tear streaked face turned red as she screamed at Kate soundlessly.

  A bizarre thought occurred to Kate. Lack of oxygen and blood loss at work, perhaps. Or some magical instinct guiding her hand. At this point, what did it matter?

  She dipped her fingers into her wound, getting the tips wet with blood. Then she smeared the blood into each of her ears. She bore down on the image of Jessie and asked one last time...

  Where are you, Jessie?

  That’s when the words finally touched Kate’s ears. Though the vision of Jessie shouted, the words sounded like a whisper. But it was definitely Jessie’s voice.

  Go to Texas.

  Then Jessie filled Kate’s mind with a picture that showed her exactly where to go.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Limbs. Heads. Torsos. Various sizes and shapes. All of them scattered like doll parts across the blood-soaked snow. Vampires everywhere. Snarling. Leaping. Unfazed by the hail of silver bullets pelting them as they continued to rend the army to pieces.

  Lockman didn’t know how long he stood in the portal’s glow, watching the carnage, shell-shocked. He had seen films and read accounts of the American’s who had stormed the beaches of Normandy. He knew how some of the men strolled across the sands in dazed wonder at the sight of so much death rendered so bloodily and quickly before them. A human’s brain could only process so much violence before it retreated within itself.

  Lockman had seen his fair share of death and mutilation.

  This, however, came too fast and too thoroughly for even him to absorb.

  Only Adam’s shouting in his ear finally woke Lockman out of his daze. “Pull back. Pull back.”

  Some of the troops on foot tried to pull back, but the vampires swarmed in from every direction and picked them off before they made it more than a few steps. Lockman tried to offer covering fire, but his shots had no effect. How could they not? All their rounds were silver. These vamps should have burst into flames and started melting with all the silver getting pumped into them.

  Adam’s rifle clicked dry. Instead of reloading, he threw the weapon into the snow and grabbed Lockman by the shoulder. “Back through the portal.”

  Lockman resisted. “I’m not leaving these men behind.”

  “There’s no one left.”

  One of the transports, tipped on its side, exploded. Orange light from the pluming flames illumi
nated the battlefield. Lockman could still see some of their people fighting the onslaught. They had slipped through the initial attack. But none of them stood any chance of slipping back through to the portal. Even as Lockman realized this, he saw most of them tackled and torn apart. Essentially, Adam was right. There was no one left who could be saved.

  But the crop dusters sat upon their flatbeds, untouched. If the silver wasn’t working for some reason, the holy water was all they had left. They couldn’t leave those for the vamps to commandeer.

  “The planes,” Lockman hollered over the last chatters of gunfire.

  He no sooner shifted his weight to charge forward, when a vamp dropped in front of him, fangs bared and face bloody. This one looked like a fresh turn. It wore a set of coveralls with a name patch that read, “Hank.”

  Lockman jammed the barrel of his rifle into the vamp’s mouth and opened up.

  The back half of the vamp’s head blew apart enough that Lockman could see his rifle’s muzzle flash coming out the hole. The vamp dropped to the ground and made sideways snow angels as it squirmed, pretty much headless. Immune to silver or not, decapitation was difficult for a vamp to recover from.

  Decapitating over a thousand vamps wasn’t going to happen, though. And as more closed in, Lockman knew getting to those planes wasn’t going to happen either. Against his every instinct, Lockman turned and ran with Adam back through the portal.

  On the other side they almost collided with Dixon and the mermaid, Alexia, on her all-terrain wheelchair.

  “Shut it down,” Lockman shouted. He charged at the crew of scientists still looking so proud of themselves, waving his arm over his head. “Shut it the fuck down.”

  They gaped at him, frozen. Obstermeyer looked the dumbest among them, his fish face all puffed out and his curly hair swaying in the breeze.

  Then a pair of vamps came through the portal. One of them hopped onto Alexia and tore her throat out. Another tackled Dixon before he could fire a single round. He struggled on the ground until the vamp punched a fist through his gut. Dixon’s limbs jittered for a second after that, then he lay still as the vamp chewed into his neck.

  One of the scientists—not Obstermeyer—came to his senses and started throwing switches on the machine. An instant later, the pane of light in the archway flickered like an old fluorescent bulb then went out. The machine’s constant humming wound down and died with the sound of a sigh.

  Adam stared at the vamp feeding on Dixon as if hypnotized. The ogre looked stunned. Lockman thought he had probably looked much the same when he first walked into the chaos on the other side of the portal.

  “Adam.” Lockman sprinted a wide arc around the vamp on Alexia and slammed his shoulder into the ogre’s side, trying to nudge him along. “Snap out of it. We have to put these vamps down.”

  The ogre shook his head and blinked. He tore open his parka and shrugged it off, revealing the sword strapped to his back. He drew the sword from the shield and charged at Dixon’s vamp. The vamp was so wrapped up in feeding, it didn’t sense Adam’s approach until the last second—just soon enough to look up and get its head lopped off. The head rolled one way and the body flopped the other, leaving a motionless Dixon in a wet mess from both the vamp’s blood and his own.

  The vamp on Alexia snapped to attention. It knelt on her lap in the wheelchair. Blood dripped off its chin. Its eyes flared as it took in Adam and his sword. Then it launched into the air, screaming. It sailed toward Adam as if shot from a cannon. Another young vamp, too fond of its new found power to realize it needed to control it.

  Adam grabbed the hilt of his sword in both hands and raised the point to meet the vamp. The vamp skewered itself on the sword, but its momentum drove the ogre backward. Adam tilted on his heels and hit the ground on his back with a breathy grunt.

  On top of him, the sword sticking through its chest and out its back, the vamp nipped at Adam like a starved mutt. Adam had enough strength to hold the vamp back, but with all its thrashing, he wouldn’t be able to hold it for long.

  Lockman knew Adam’s sword had to be at least coated with silver if not made from it entirely. Yet the element had none of the effects it normally would on the vamp. It continued to twist and snarl as if the sword stuck in it were nothing but an accessory.

  Unlike many ogres, Lockman didn’t carry a sword. He had a KA-BAR knife tucked in his boot. Not much use for decapitations. He scanned his surroundings, looking for anything he could use as a suitable weapon. He still clung to his rifle, but he knew the magazine didn’t have enough rounds to obliterate the vamp’s head like he had that other one.

  All he saw around him was grass with a hint of frost on it from the cold night. Not so much as a rock to try and bash the thing’s head in with.

  Meanwhile, Adam’s grip slipped and the vamp nearly took off a piece of his face. The ogre managed to get an arm between them first and shoved the vamp back a little.

  Hell with it. He had to work with what he had and hope for the best.

  He dug his KA-BAR out and charged, knife in one hand, rifle up and ready in the other. He pressed the barrel of the gun against the vamp’s head and pulled the trigger. As he suspected, the gun quit after only a short burst. The force of the shot knocked the vamp off of Adam, though. Lockman wasted no time following through. He leaped forward and thrust the knife up under the vamp’s chin, clean through to the roof of its mouth. The knife temporarily pinned the vamp’s mouth shut. Only now Lockman was left without a weapon.

  The vamp kicked out, catching Lockman in the gut and throwing him back a dozen yards before he hit the ground rolling. The creature hopped to its feet and wrenched the knife out. Blood soaked the front of its clothes and what spurted down from under its jaw hardly seemed to make a difference. It hissed at Lockman, spraying a mist of red from its mouth.

  With its attention on Lockman, it didn’t see Obstermeyer come up behind it with a crucifix in hand. “Hey!”

  The vamp spun to face the physicist. It’s eyes locked on the cross.

  Obstermeyer shook it in the vamps face, a smug smile on his face like he’d had when his machine came to life. Lockman both admired the physicist’s surprising bravery and pitied his stupidity.

  The vamp batted the cross out of Obstermeyer’s hand. It tumbled away into the dark. Obstermeyer’s eyes bulged like never before. His cheeks puffed. The vamp swung Lockman’s knife and cut halfway through Obstermeyer’s throat. The physicist dropped quickly, gurgling.

  Lockman growled as he took to his feet. No matter his feelings toward Obstermeyer, he was still one of theirs. Another casualty out of too damn many.

  The vamp turned back to Lockman. It made a noise that might have been a laugh.

  Adam had since regained his feet, but he stood as helpless and impotent as Lockman. Neither of them had anything left to fight with.

  One vamp. They couldn’t take out one fucking vamp.

  Lockman realized leaving behind those planes didn’t matter a bit. If the silver didn’t work, and crosses didn’t work, holy water would only wash off the blood. These vamps had become nearly unstoppable.

  “I’ve enjoyed fighting by your side, Craig Lockman,” Adam said. “It has been an honor.” Then he charged the vamp barehanded.

  What the hell? Crazy ogre. “Adam, no.”

  The vamp met Adam halfway, colliding into him with fangs bared, hands in claws and scratching at Adam’s face. This time, Adam didn’t push the vamp away. He let the vamp latch on and sink its teeth into his throat. It gave him the leverage he needed to wrench the sword free. He tossed the sword in Lockman’s direction, then hugged the vamp to him.

  The vamp didn’t seem to realize the ogre had sacrificed himself to trap it. The beast continued to feed, wrapping its legs around Adam’s waist while Adam staggered about like a drunk. Lockman knew from experience that an ogre’s strength was immense. But he wouldn’t last long.

  The sword lay at Lockman’s feet. He grabbed it and charged forward, crying o
ut until his lungs ached and his throat rasped. When he reached Adam and the vamp, he hesitated. He couldn’t chance a swing that might hit the ogre.

  Adam’s eyes glared over the vamp’s shoulder. “Do it.” He fell to his knees.

  Lockman lifted the sword over his head and swung downward, catching the vamp on the side of the neck it had canted upward as it gnawed on Adam. But Lockman had hedged in his effort to keep from cutting Adam. The blow sliced only about a quarter of the way through the vamp’s throat.

  Lockman got its attention, though.

  The vamp detached from Adam and spun around to face Lockman. Fury burned in its mad eyes, yet its fanged mouth curled up in a smile. The thing looked about ready to say something.

  Lockman swung the sword and lopped off its head.

  The vamp’s expression turned shocked as its head bounced away. A straight fountain of blood shot from the stub of its neck still on its shoulders. The body stood on its feet a couple seconds, hands opening and closing into fists. Then it tried to take a step forward, stumbled, swayed, and collapsed to the ground.

  Lockman dropped the sword and ran to Adam’s side. The ogre lay on his back, eyes wide and searching, as if the stars were telling him something. The wound in his neck was about the size of Lockman’s fist, exposing torn tendons and broken arteries pulsing with blood. Even with his big ogre heart and massive ogre strength, Adam wouldn’t survive the damage.

  The ogre tried to speak.

  Taking Adam’s hand, Lockman hushed him. “Don’t struggle any more than you have to.”

  But Adam refused to stay silent. “What...happened...?”

  Every nerve ending in Lockman’s body burned like an ember. He shook when he answered. “Gabriel got there first.”

  The ogre’s lips parted as if to say more, then his eyes fluttered shut, one long last breath sighed out his mouth, and he went still.

  Lockman couldn’t help but think of Marty at that moment. How many from his clan had now died while fighting alongside Lockman? He looked up and around him. Alexia hung limp in her wheelchair. Dixon lay in a pool of his own blood. Obstermeyer’s dead eyes stared into the night with no hint of his smugness left. The other scientists had run off somewhere, but they didn’t matter.