I’ve never seen any creature move so quickly. The vampire catches up with Viktor in about three seconds from what has to be at least thirty yards away. For my part, I raise my gun to shoot at it, but don’t have enough time or enough of a target to make it worth the effort to try a shot. Then there’s the matter of whether or not a bullet would do any good. Vampires have thinner hides than demons, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered one this old. Seeing it move I’m wondering if it might actually be older than three centuries.
Catching him from behind, the vampire breaks Viktor’s neck with one swift jerk and buries its face into the side of his neck. It is a magnificent and terrible thing to behold. It’s also a golden opportunity to run to the nearest building and get some cover before it can come after us, but I’m so dumbfounded by the sheer violence of it all that I can’t seem to move.
Clara’s not so transfixed. “Come on!” she urges, jerking at my sleeve.
With her in the lead, we sprint to the door of the nearest building—an inner perimeter barracks house that is not, to the best of my knowledge, in use. Clara tries the door and finds it to be locked. I pull her around the side of the building and out of the light.
“We make for the admin building,” I say.
“Past the vampire?” she exclaims.
“Look at it,” I say, thumbing around the corner of the building. “The door’s unlocked.”
Thanks to the light directly over the front of the door to the administrative building, one can clearly see the door has been left slightly ajar. Clara peeks around the corner and confirms this.
“So? She’ll still catch us before we ever get there.”
A decent point. Especially since the space between us and that door is probably the best-lit area in the entire base and the vampire is right in the middle of it. The direct route would take us right past her.
“We can cut around,” I suggest. “Avoid the compound.”
“Worth a try, I guess.”
Right then, the tanks in the lab go up. The detonation is not quite tremendous enough to blow open any of the walls—it’s one of the few made of bricks, as apparently, when the army built it they took the story of the three little pigs to heart—but it does make the ground shake dramatically enough to knock both of us over.
I get back to my feet and help Clara up.
“This seems like a good time to run,” I say.
After rounding the first corner of the barracks building we take off in a dead sprint for the edge of the second barracks—the building where the scientists sleep—with me leading, but Clara in position to pass me. Impending death makes one run faster. I think that’s probably why they fire a gun before track meets.
I turn the next corner, which puts us on a beeline for the front door of the administrative building.
Or it would have, had I not tripped. I look back to see what I’d caught my leg on. Face down, in pajamas and looking extremely deceased, is one of Viktor’s teammates.
“He must have come out the window,” Clara says. Indeed, the window to the barracks has been broken out. I peer inside.
I can’t say I ever got a chance to really know all of the scientists that were a part of Viktor’s group during my stay. But they were always fairly polite and generally decent toward me, and I imagine if this were a different world and all of us ended up walking away and I ran into one of them sometime later in a bar or something, I would not have a problem sharing a drink with them. So I feel sort of sad, looking in through the shattered window and seeing the carnage inside. I don’t think any of them deserved to be murdered. Certainly most of them didn’t.
“It went in after them,” Clara whispers.
“No time to worry about that now,” I say. “We have to get out of the open.”
“Why?” she asks. “It doesn’t look like buildings pose much of a—”
She stops, staring over my shoulder. I turn around.
The vampire is between us and the open door of the admin building. I didn’t think she could suck Viktor dry that quickly.
I position myself between her and Clara, and extend my arms, a little mini-cordon that won’t stop the vampire any more than it would stop a flame thrower. But it looks gallant, and I figure I may as well go out acting gallantly. Behind me, Clara’s muttering the Lord’s Prayer.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” I say to the vampire.
She stands up from her crouch and takes two hesitant steps toward us.
“Get out of the way and I’ll shoot it,” Clara mutters.
“No,” I say. “Look.”
“Look at what?”
“She’s not attacking.”
Indeed, the vampire has stopped moving and is tilting her head and looking at us with a curiosity that seems absent any real malevolence. We’re being studied.
“Are you doing this?” Clara asks.
“I’m not doing anything. She just doesn’t want to kill us.”
“Why not?”
“Try not to sound offended.”
A noise in another part of the base somewhere, well beyond my range of hearing, but clearly not beyond the vampire’s, takes her attention away from us. Then she leaps twenty feet nearly straight up and lands on the roof of the barracks. In another second she’s out of sight.
“I think I peed my pants,” Clara says. “Why’d she do that?”
“I wish I knew,” I say. “But I’m not about to complain.”
“Let’s get one of the cars and get out of here before she changes her mind.”
“Not yet,” I say. “We still have to destroy the data on the server.”
* * *
The front door to the admin building is covered by a large wood awning with a rounded top, which distinguishes it from every other building in the place insofar as whoever designed it gave a damn about basic aesthetics. I’m guessing, based on the distribution of the windows and the apparent usage of several of the rooms, that unlike the lab, the inside was left more or less intact after it was purchased by Bob Grindel’s group. As I said, Bob tended to enjoy watching me from his picture window above that awning when I was taken to the lab in the morning. He always had this pose—feet apart, hands on hips—that gave off a certain “I am the king of all I survey” attitude that made me want to kill him. I never quite got over that.
So it was with mixed pleasure that I had learned from Clara that not only is the main computer storage in the admin building, there’s a possibility Bob has made a copy of it in his office. Trying to destroy the computers, and retrieve the disks from Bob, vastly increases the likelihood that I will not survive the evening, but on the bright side, it provides me with an excellent opportunity to kill him. Provided the vampire hasn’t caught up to him yet.
“Do you know where the computer-whatever is?” I ask Clara as soon as we’re inside.
“The tower? I think so. There’s a locked room down the hall. I’ve never been in it, but I felt the door once, and it was cool.”
“In a slang sense?” I ask, confused.
“Air conditioning.”
“Um, okay. Can you get into the room on your own?”
“With the key. Where are you going?”
“Upstairs. To check for copies.”
She looks at me archly. “You don’t even know what a zip disk looks like.”
“I’m a quick learner.”
She holds out her hand and I give up the key ring. “He’s already left the base,” she says. “You know that, right? He probably went straight for his helicopter as soon as I wounded him.”
“Probably,” I agree. “Can’t hurt to check.”
I get a frown from her. “Back at the apartment, when I was trying to convince you to come here, it was just so I could follow. You don’t actually have to exact revenge, or whatever it is you think you’re doing here.”
“Do you think I’m doing this to impress you?”
“I’m just sorry I called you cowardly is all.”
; “Clara, if he’s upstairs and I skipped out without even trying to go after him, I’ll be kicking myself for the next three centuries.”
“Fine,” she shrugs. “I’ll meet you back here in a few. Then maybe we can get the hell out of here already.”
She runs off down the hall while I head up the center staircase that’s directly in front of me.
Clara’s right. As long as the vampire isn’t interested in biting either of us on the neck, there’s no good reason for us not to grab the nearest Humvee and escape while we still can. Which means I’m doing exactly what I told her in New York I wasn’t going to do—acting out solely in the name of vengeance. And, as I’ve said before, that’s nearly always a mistake. But I’d really like to kill Bob, and I’m not looking to be reasonable about it at this point.
I reach the second floor landing, check the gun—still a half-clip left—and slip the vial of chicken pox I took from the lab into my hand. The gun is for Bob, who I’m thinking is no less bulletproof now, than he was an hour ago when Clara winged him. The vial is for Brutus.
The center office is only a few paces from the landing. I sneak up to it and, finding the door ajar, I kick it completely open and spin into the room firing. I reasoned, perhaps stupidly, that if Bob was anywhere he’d be at his desk and that his desk just had to be near the picture window. Completely wrong, naturally. The only thing the bullets hit is the window, which manages to crack spectacularly in several places.
A heavy hand comes down from the right of the doorway and knocks the gun out of my grasp. Before I have much of a chance to register this, I’m shoved to the floor myself, albeit several feet away from the gun. Brutus is on top of me a second later, one mitt wrapped around my neck.
“Not yet,” says Bob. The lights are out in the room, so the best I can figure is that he’s somewhere to the right of the half-shattered window. Behind the desk. If I were even a bit smart, I would have asked Clara how the office was set up before going and assuming things.
“Pick him up.”
Brutus complies by lifting me by the neck—not real comfortable, that—and pressing me up against the wall.
My eyes adjust and there’s Bob with a very large suitcase open atop the desk. He has a white bandage on his shoulder, which he’s bled through.
“It looks like you’ve been busy,” he notes. He points out the window. The fire in the lab flickers obediently, currently in the process of devouring the wood roof.
“Just… destroying the evidence,” I say. Talking is a real challenge.
“Yes, well… sorry to tell you this, but you’ve failed. I have all the copies of the research I need right here. At worst, you’ve scored only a minor setback.”
“You still need the blood of an immortal to make it work,” I say. “Eve’s gone. And you can’t have mine.”
Bob laughs. A disappointing reaction. “Think, Adam. How do you suppose we proved the treatment worked?”
Uh-oh.
“Yes. Human testing. And who better than me to try it out on?” He picks up the suitcase. “I’ve got just about all the immortal blood I’m ever going to need. So, as I think I said earlier, you’re officially expendable.”
He gets face-to-face with me. If I thought I could produce spit at this moment, I would. Bob says, “That was well-played, by the way. The bit about the vampire, I mean. I didn’t see that coming. Mind telling me how you freed it?”
“Magic.”
He smiles. “I don’t need to know that badly. I trust Ms. Wassermann is downstairs right now?”
“She’s dead,” I whisper.
“You’re a bad liar. I saw you come in together. No matter. I’ll pick her up on my way out. Good-bye.” To Brutus, he says, “Meet me downstairs when you’re done with him.”
Bob steps out the door and shuts it behind him.
Brutus smiles at me, and starts to squeeze.
“Wait,” I say, holding up my left hand. The vial is still palmed there.
“What?”
Killing me would take about as long for him as it would for me to crush a centipede. He has time.
I say, “You ever read H. G. Wells?”
“Who?” he asks, and when his mouth opens to form the ‘o’ sound, I shove the vial into it.
He lets go of me. When I land, I take a few seconds to enjoy breathing and then get to my feet, snatch the gun from the floor, and await the inevitable.
Brutus staggers backward up against the closed door and grabs at his throat. I’m about to say something pithy—the situation calls for it—but then I hear him crunching down on the glass and swishing the contents around in his mouth like he’s at a wine-tasting. Then he stands up straight, shoots me a smile, and spits the cork onto the carpet.
“A little bitter,” he says, “but not bad. Could’ve used some pepper.”
“Oh shit,” I say, succinctly.
“Sorry. You want me to jump around, maybe scratch my throat, wave my arms or something?”
A couple more pieces fit into place for me. “It was you,” I say. “In the third room.”
“Yeah. Well, me and Ringo. Doc fixed us both up so we don’t get sick no more. And that’s just the start. Mr. Grindel’s gonna take care of all of our friends, too. Time our kind came out of hiding.”
“How could he have been so stupid?” I ask. Because it’s one thing to try and help people who get sick. It’s another to fix the immune system of an otherwise invulnerable race of sociopaths. Bob and Viktor both must have been out of their minds to even consider it.
“Mr. Grindel seems to think there’s only a few of us around,” he explains. “He’s in for a surprise. Too bad this came too late for Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?”
“The one you killed in New York. I’m gonna have to hurt you for that, cuz he took that job after I recommended him to Mr. Grindel, so I’m feeling guilty now, and I hate feeling guilty.”
With one arm he lifts the desk and throws it up against the wall. Which is bad, as I was in the process of putting the desk between us at the time. And there’s nothing else that’s big and heavy to hide behind, other than Brutus.
“You’re gonna have to pay for Ringo, too,” he says. “He was a straight-up guy.”
“I didn’t kill Ringo,” I argue.
“May as well have.”
He takes a step toward me. I raise the gun, but just for show, as it would be a huge waste of bullets unless I managed to hit an eye. (Demon eyes are small and deep-set, as if they evolved in anticipation of just such a moment.) Brutus is still standing between me and the door, and the office isn’t particularly large, so I don’t have a lot in the way of maneuverability to work with.
Seeing no other option, I take the only exit that’s available, the window.
I spin around and run straight at it, hitting the glass as hard as I can with my shoulder. It gives, but not quite as efficiently as I thought it would. This would be my first time through plate glass, and I stupidly assumed it would be as easy as it looks in the movies.
So I end up a bit stunned by the impact. And falling fifteen feet is not a good time to be stunned, just in general. My trajectory takes me to the edge of the awning. I bounce off it—the good news being it slows my descent, the bad being that it feels like I’ve dislocated my shoulder—and then fall the remaining distance.
I nearly get my feet under me before impact, but not quite. One leg is all I can muster. Something goes pop in my knee and then I’m down in a heap. It’s a non-dead heap, and for that I can only be grateful. I just wish every part of my body didn’t hurt quite so much.
The gun lands a few feet away. It takes all the energy I have left to reach it. And just as I do I feel the ground tremble.
“That was pretty good,” Brutus says. I look around, which is a treat because there’s a piece of broken glass under me, and whenever I shift it digs a bit deeper into my ribcage. Brutus had jumped out of the shattered window after me and is now standing a few feet away, looking perfectly s
ound. I am about to die.
“I didn’t quite stick the landing,” I admit.
“No, but points for trying. Pretty ballsy.”
I’m trying to come up with an adequate prayer for this moment, but one doesn’t come to mind. Too many faiths to choose from. Too many gods. Don’t think any of them are listening.
And then a blur from the corner of my eye becomes a whoosh of air and a loud, violent impact in the center of Brutus’s chest. My first thought is that someone has fired a rocket from somewhere.
The demon doesn’t move, although in hindsight he probably wishes he had. By not giving in to the impact, he just makes it easier for the vampire to drive her arm straight through him.
They stand still like that for a few seconds. She is rooting around inside of his chest, which is just about exactly as disgusting as it sounds.
Then she jerks her arm out again and takes a tangle of internal organs with her, and punches him flush in the face, causing his pug nose to actually cave in. Brutus gives a little whimper, falls to his knees, and then sags onto his side.
She remains standing over him holding what looks to be his heart waiting to make sure he can’t go on without one. When it’s clear he cannot, she tosses the heart aside.
I’m wondering if she still doesn’t feel like killing me.
And then she speaks.
“Lord Venice… What is this place?”
My jaw drops. “Eloise?”
She turns and brushes the hair from her face. It’s her all right, as beautiful as ever, but in sore need of a bath to wash away the dried blood.
“I knew your smell, but it did not seem possible. I thought you dead.”
“And I you,” I respond. By my calculations she’s at least two and a half centuries past her expiration date. “How have you lasted so long?”
“I was well-schooled in the art of immortality,” she quips. A blood tear streaks down her face, poor thing. She looks so confused. “Tell me, milord, have I gone mad?”
“Don’t move, either of you!”
I tilt my head—the best I can do for the moment—to check the source of the voice. Bob has emerged from the admin building. In front of him, holding the briefcase, is Clara. He has a gun pointed at her head.
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