The Savage End (The Vampire World Saga Book 6)

by P. T. Hylton

  The Twisted charging from the left careened backward into a tree when a round tore into his chest. He paused, glancing down at the hole in his side as he regained his footing, then continued forward for a few steps until a round through his head finished the job. Alex made a mental note to buy Felix a beer for that shot.

  Still the enemies continued to charge.

  Adrenaline flowed through Alex’s veins as a simple but devastating thought flashed in her mind—There are too many. She gritted her teeth and fired again. The expression on the lead Twisted’s face went slack when Alex’s bullet found his heart. A shot rang out from her right and another Twisted went down, courtesy of Chuck, but the seven remaining creatures were only twenty feet from her now. One of them raised a pistol, and Alex quickly ducked back behind the boulder a moment before a round slammed into the stone. She pressed her back against the rock and readied herself as bullets continued to ricochet off the boulder. She knew that at any moment the Twisted would reach her position, and she wanted to take one more of them out before she died.

  Suddenly, the gunfire stopped and a high-pitched scream took its place. A body—or at least a body part—thudded against the ground. A few more shots rang out, but none of them hit the boulder. The Twisted had a new target. Alex slowly shifted her position, angling to see what was happening.

  The sight before her caused Alex to freeze for a moment. Even with everything she had seen, this image would haunt her dreams.

  A blood-splattered Jaden stood over a Twisted woman who lay on the ground, one arm missing and her legs removed at the knees. Her remaining arm was outstretched, the fingers clutching at the ground as she tried to drag herself toward her fallen weapon. Three more Twisted bodies lay separated from their heads on the forest floor.

  The closest remaining Twisted stood ten feet in front of Jaden, a pistol raised in his shaking hands. Despite his Twisted form, Alex could tell he was a young man. He squeezed off a shot but Jaden moved like water, avoiding the bullet. He crossed the distance between them in a moment, his sword in motion, and sliced off both the man’s arms.

  Alex flinched as blood splattered across the forest floor. She’d seen Jaden in battle a dozen times now, and he always went for the clean kill. Brutal, but efficient. This time he’d avoided the quick kill, opting for pain. She regained her composure and rejoined the fight, finishing off the woman crawling for her gun and the man with the amputated arms as Jaden charged past. She was vaguely aware of distant reports of rifles, but she didn’t know if they were from the GMT or their enemies.

  Jaden’s elongated mouth snarled, exposing his razor-sharp teeth to the gum line. Those awful teeth looked like they wanted to escape his mouth and drive themselves into his enemies. Four more Twisted raised their guns as he approached. One of them fired, and a bullet struck Jaden’s right shoulder, but he barely seemed to notice. He ducked between the two nearest Twisted, who stood four feet apart. He let out a grunt as he brought his swords up in a flash, slicing through both soldiers at the waist. They screamed as they fell, but he’d already moved on. The last two Twisted stood frozen at the sight of the carnage. Before they could process what they had just seen, Jaden removed their heads.

  Alex fired one shot into the heads of each of the Twisted Jaden had cut in half, silencing their screams. The breath seemed to leave the forest, and she was surrounded by silence. She slipped back behind part of the boulder for cover and spoke into her radio. “We’re clear on the forest floor. What is everyone’s status?”

  Chuck answered first. “We are all clear. I don’t see any other snipers. Owl went to check their position, to be sure we got all of them.”

  “There were a few shots that were too close for comfort, but I’m clear and unharmed,” Felix reported.

  “We are good,” Owl chimed in. “All the snipers are down.”

  Alex stood up and walked to Jaden. She gripped her pistols tightly as she approached, unsure what he would do next. He slowly walked toward Alex. Blood dripped from his blades, leaving twin trails along the forest floor. The snarl left his face and he started to look like himself.

  “What the hell was that?” Alex asked.

  Jaden wiped his blades on his sleeves and then put them into their sheaths. “That was the beginning of vengeance.”

  6

  The GMT gathered in Brian’s lab an hour after the battle. Alex had told her team to shower, get cleaned up, and meet to talk. Since Agartha’s vampires were all either dead or Twisted now, the sense of urgency around finding a cure had dissipated. Brian had released his disheartened staff and told them to get some much-needed rest. The GMT had the lab to themselves.

  Alex surveyed her team as they entered. None of them spoke at first, not even Ed. The battle had clearly shaken them. Owl seemed the least disturbed, but even she had a vacant look in her eyes. Frank was at the other end of the spectrum, his face screwed up in a mask of discomfort.

  Jaden didn’t join them, which didn’t surprise Alex. She wasn’t sure whether he still considered himself a member of the GMT, but even if he did, he was dealing with the death of nearly a hundred friends at the moment.

  “You did well,” she said to her gathered team. “Frank, I liked the way you carried yourself out there. I know you’re inexperienced, but I have some thoughts on how we can use your skills without requiring you to be an expert soldier overnight. If we send Owl out as point, we can use you to—”

  “Captain, are we really not going to talk about what just happened?” Chuck asked, his voice soft, but firm.

  Alex glared at him, annoyed at the interruption. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “When you called us here for a debrief, I thought we were going to talk about Jaden’s… um…”

  “Slaughter,” Felix finished. There was anger in his voice, barely hidden behind his usually unreadable face. “It was a slaughter. That woman whose legs he cut off? That was Christi Palmer. She worked behind a desk at badge headquarters. She had two kids.”

  Alex swallowed hard. “I know. I recognized her, too.”

  “And that man he chopped in half at the waist? Tyrone Merrick. He headed up that program that worked with the school kids on civic projects.”

  Alex said nothing. She hadn’t known Tyrone.

  “And how about Santiago Ramos? Jaden chopped off the dude’s arms and left him there for two minutes before you finished him off.”

  Alex took a step toward Felix. “And what was he supposed to do? They were enemy combatants. Maryana sent them to kill us. You’d prefer he had a nice chat with them, maybe invited them inside for tea? He did what he had to do.”

  Frank shook his head, his sad eyes wide. “Taking out enemies is one thing, but that was a Quentin Tarantino movie.”

  Alex didn’t get the reference, but she wasn’t about to ask for clarification now. She turned to Ed. “Tell them. This is how battles go down, sometimes.”

  Ed thought for a long moment, then shrugged. “Alex, I’ve seen some shit in my time. At least, I thought I had. But Jaden wasn’t just trying to kill his enemies. He was trying to hurt them. It’s not right. Especially knowing they aren’t fighting of their own free will.”

  Alex sighed. She had to admit that she agreed with them. She’d tried to explain away what she’d seen, but it had bothered her. “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

  They went over the rest of the battle, and Alex gave the debrief she’d been intending. The Twisted were a new enemy, and they needed to take every encounter as an opportunity to learn and grow. And with Maryana’s huge army, it seemed they’d have plenty of opportunities to do just that.

  After the rest of the team dispersed, Brian called Alex over. “You talked to Jaden? About turning more vampires?”

  She nodded. “He won’t do it. He thinks it would cheapen the deaths of his friends, I guess. He believes it’s time for humanity to stand on its own two feet.”

  Brian was silent for a long time, his eyes on the floor. Alex was about to leave when
he spoke again. “It strikes me that Jaden may not be in the best mindset for proper decision making.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying we should go ahead and do it? Without Jaden’s okay?”

  Brian looked up, meeting her eyes. “I’m just raising the possibility.”

  “How, then? Owl?”

  “Perhaps. Or, if we want to do it a little more cleanly…” He opened his hand, revealing a vial of dark liquid. “Frank’s change made it clear that we don’t need a vampire to turn someone. We just need a vampire’s blood. Jaden gave us a few samples to use when we were working on the cure. I’ve got this one left.”

  Alex stared down at the vial in her friend’s hand. Such a small glass tube, and so much potential to change the world. How many Twisted could they create from that one vial? Enough to catch Maryana by surprise and take her out? Even if they didn’t involve other Agartha humans, she could turn herself and the other GMT members. How much more effective would they be with vampire powers?

  “I don’t know, man. Sometimes I think Jaden overdoes it with his whole wisdom-of-the-ages thing. But I think we can all agree he’s an expert when it comes to vampires. I’m thinking maybe we should listen to him this time.”

  Brian carefully set the vial on the table and gave Alex a long look. “I marked it as used in the inventory. Do what you want with it, but I can’t keep it.”

  “Well, shit.” Alex put the vial into her vest pocket. It felt hard and cold against her chest. “We don’t have to decide anything now. There’s something else I need to talk to you about. Now that you’re not working on the cure, I was hoping you’d help me figure out a way into New Haven. You spent time hiding in the underbelly of the ship during Fleming’s reign, and I feel like you’ve got a pretty good read on the defenses.”

  Brian nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that since we left the ship, actually. And the way I see it, there’s only one surefire way to get into New Haven.”

  Alex waited outside Jaden’s quarters for nearly two hours before he finally showed up, his normally alert eyes focused on nothing more than the floor three feet in front of him. He looked bone tired.

  “I figured you’d have to sleep sometime,” Alex said with a grin.

  He glanced up at her. “It’s strange. I’m used to daysickness telling me in no uncertain terms when it’s time to sleep. Now that the daysickness is gone, sometimes I forget to sleep.” He paused in front of her. “You need something, before I turn in?”

  “I was hoping we could chat for a moment.”

  He glanced at the door to his quarters. “Can it wait? I haven’t slept since New Haven.”

  “Then I’ll keep it short. Brian has a plan, and I think it’s a good one.”

  He looked at her blankly for a long moment. “A plan for what?”

  “Are you kidding me right now? A plan to take out Maryana!”

  He let out a soft sound that might have been a disbelieving laugh. “You still don’t understand what’s happening. We can’t take her out. We should be looking for an exit strategy.”

  Alex looked at him, her eyes wide with shock. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want to run?”

  Jaden pointed at the sky. “She’s toying with us. She has an army of forty thousand people, and she sent fifteen.”

  “They’re not her army. Not most of them, anyway. They’re her prisoners, and they need our help.”

  “She’s going to keep turning them and sending them after us. Do you think I liked killing all those innocent New Haven badges?”

  Alex took a step toward him. “I don’t know. Did you?”

  He broke his gaze away from hers and looked at the ground. “Perhaps I let my anger get the best of me during the battle. I apologize.”

  Alex didn’t know what to say to that. She wanted to tell him that it was fine, but it wasn’t. He’d hacked off those peoples’ limbs. “Look, I get what you’re saying. Maryana is insane. She could start throwing people off New Haven and raining them down on us. Or maybe she’ll keep sending little groups to attack until we’ve killed every badge on New Haven. That’s my point. That’s why we can’t wait for some ideal moment to strike. Every hour is another sixty minutes she has control over everyone in my city. We have to stop her now.”

  Jaden looked into her eyes, as if searching for something. She didn’t know what he was looking for. Perhaps resolve. Perhaps something else. “My mind… it isn’t right at the moment. My mental capacity, my decision making, even my control of my emotions… they’re slipping, and I can’t trust them. And I don’t know how long it will take until I get them back. But the one thing that I do trust is my body. I’ve trained it for over a thousand years, and it will react as it needs to. I’m a living weapon, Alex. Your job is to point me to the target.”

  “That I can do.” Alex couldn’t help but smile. Jaden might not be in top mental form, but at least he was aware of his limitations. She could deal with that.

  “Good. So what’s the plan?”

  Her smile quickly faded. She didn’t much like what she was about to say, but she agreed with Brian’s assessment. This was the only surefire way to get to Maryana. “We’re going to bring New Haven out of the sky.”

  7

  The clouds looked like a soft white blanket hiding the earth below it. Maryana stood in the flight control room staring out across the horizon. She didn’t believe in any god, but she thought she might be standing in heaven—a man-made heaven just for her. This city-ship carried all the humans she could ever eat, and they were trapped like rats. Best of all, they were rats that she could play with for as long as she wanted. There was no one with the strength to challenge her on the ship, and the people who might dare to were trapped in a hole in a mountain. New Haven was paradise.

  She stood with her hands crossed behind her back, completely relaxed. She’d transformed every person on the flight deck to a Twisted, just as she’d done to everyone who operated any essential system on the ship. It was a wonderful feeling—she truly controlled New Haven, stern to stem.

  The flight control room’s door opened and a Twisted marched in. He stood before Maryana, staring down at her with powder-blue eyes that looked out of place in his monstrous face.

  “Hey, Mikey,” she said, her voice cheerful. “Do you have an update for me?”

  Mike—who hated to be called Mikey—tried not to tremble. He hated Maryana with every fiber of his deformed body. “The Twisted who attacked Agartha are dead.”

  She raised an eyebrow, annoyed. “So that’s how it is? Straight to business? You can’t open with ‘you look great, Maryana,’ or ‘hey, how’s the family’?” She shook her head sadly.

  Mike waited in silence, not sure what to say.

  “It’s called small talk, Mikey.” Maryana’s voice sounded sweet and concerned. “I’ll start. How are you doing today?”

  Mike didn’t want to speak, but his mouth responded to his mistress’s question immediately. “Bad. I’m afraid of you, and I just found out that fifteen badges were killed in the attack on Agartha. They were my friends, and—”

  Maryana slapped him across the face. He staggered backward, barely keeping his balance. “Shut up, Mike. I don’t want to hear your whining.”

  Mike put a hand to his jaw, checking to see if it was broken.

  Maryana burst into a fit of laughter. She squeezed out the words between giggles. “I’m just messing with you. I can’t believe that you actually thought I cared how you were doing.” The laughter stopped. “Seriously, I want to know how things went on the surface.”

  “All fifteen of them are dead.”

  “So you mentioned. Did they destroy some of the defenses?”

  “The eyes on the ground reported several defensive turrets were destroyed in the attack. The GMT and Jaden came out of the city to engage our troops.”

  Maryana perked up a bit. “Did we kill any of them?”

  “No, but the report noted Jaden acting...” Mike paused,
searching for the right word. “...unusual during the battle.”

  “Unusual how? What was he doing?”

  “He didn’t go for quick kills. He dismembered the badges, like he wanted them to suffer before they died.”

  “Huh. That’s great news.” Maryana threw an arm around Mike’s shoulders and stood next to him. “I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that all of Jaden's buddies are dead. He’s never taken the deaths of his precious vampires lightly. I bet watching all of them die from the virus really got under his skin. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re crazy.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he flinched, readying himself to be hit again.

  Instead, she just squeezed his shoulder gently. “I appreciate the honesty, Mikey. Come on. Let’s go get some new recruits to fill up the ranks. We’re going to need them for what’s next.”

  The lobby of the badge headquarters was not meant to hold a crowd. Now, there were two hundred men and women standing shoulder to shoulder, terrified expressions on their faces. Twisted stood around the perimeter, rifles at the ready if anyone stepped out of line.

  Maryana sauntered through the door, and muted cries of fear came from the crowd. She ignored them, marching past and jumping up on the reception desk, so that everyone in the room could see her. She glanced down at the woman directly in front of her who was nearly pressed against the desk by the pressure of the people behind her. The woman let out a soft whimper. Maryana reached down and tousled her hair. Then she turned to the crowd.

  “Thank you all for coming in today.” She paused, flashing a smile that exposed the pointed teeth in her deformed mouth. “Really, all of you should be thanking me. This very day, some of you will be chosen to ascend! You will become immortal, super strong, with heightened senses. Basically, better in every way. I had to fight for years for the chance I’m about to hand you, and when I did it, vampires couldn’t even go into sunlight. How lucky are all of you?”