Spitting out the head of the other guard, Gordon spun around again to face the remaining two men. The president had turned and ran toward the side of the building and the last bodyguard finished reloading his gun and was running after him.
Gordon snarled, taking off after them.
The guard, running as he was, his body angled back toward Gordon, started to shoot at him. Gordon ignored the occasional burning sensation as a bullet pierced his scaled hide. The dozen or so wounds he had received from the first barrage had already healed themselves, and these would be no different.
By the time he reached the guard, he was out of bullets. Punching forward with one huge clawed fist, he sent the guard sailing backward. The president was only a few yards in front of the guard and was almost hit by the man’s body.
With a burst of speed, Gordon took several strides, then planted his clawed foot on the back of the fallen man. As his full body weight bore down on the man, Gordon could feel his ribcage collapse and his torso flatten with a disgusting mix of snapping and squishing sounds.
Launching himself forward and upward, Gordon sailed through the air. The president turned his head, searching for Gordon, only to find him descending on him. The man threw himself forward, and Gordon landed with a heavy thud, shattering concrete.
The moment he landed; Gordon used his momentum to hurl himself forward. Stretching his body out, he lunged at the president as he flew, snapping his jaws as he did, taking the man between the legs, his mouth closing, encasing the man’s groin and lower torso.
They both landed with a crash.
The president screamed as Gordon’s fangs pierced his flesh, muscle and in the case of his torso, vital organs.
With an impressive show of strength, Gordon lifted himself up, with the man still entrapped within his jaws. Standing up fully, the man dangled from his mouth, the weight pulling his snout downward. The president struggled, his hands pounding against Gordon’s nose and the side of his mouth.
Bracing himself, feet splayed apart, he raised his head, bringing the body of the president arcing upward. The man, neck bent to stare, first upward at Gordon, and now downward at him in a mask of fear. His eyes were wide and his mouth open in an ‘O’.
When Gordon had the man near vertical, he brought his head back down in a swift movement. The speed and force of the action was so hard, when the man’s head struck the pavement it collapsed from the impact. Skull and brain matter flattened out to either side. Blood sprayed outward, like a watermelon dropped from a roof. Red blood mixed with pinkish-gray brain matter and pieces of hair-covered skull fragments littered the ground.
Gordon released his grip and the man’s body slumped down. A whimper came from behind him and Gordon glanced back over his scaled shoulder to see a clump of people by the back door, frozen in place. Dozens of eyes, wide in horror, stared at him. Which one had made the sound, he couldn’t guess.
He turned to face them, his teeth now dripping blood, and attempted a grin.
“We can do this the hard way. Or the less hard way,” he told them.
They scattered.
Gordon rattled out a sigh. “Hard way it is.”
He took off after the nearest one.
Blain stalked the cubicles of the upper floor, knocking their chintzy walls over. He could hear shouts of fear occasionally from the side offices. After flattening the middle of the office floor to make sure no one hid in the warren of half walls and poorly built desks and eliminating any cover, he moved to the first office door.
Lifting one hoofed foot, he slammed it against the wooden portal near the handle and it broke around the lock but didn’t open. He had seen how the door had pulled away at the top, but the bottom of the door held fast. He realized they must have some sort of locking mechanism near the base of the door to prevent someone from busting the door open.
But he wasn’t just, someone.
Backing up a dozen paces, he lowered his head and bolted at the door. Driving his forehead into the door, it shattered around him and he barreled through to shouts of alarm and terror.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Someone had a gun and shot him. Once. Twice. Three times.
Blain turned toward the shots. A woman stood there in front of seven others, a handgun held out in front of her. She shook so much; he was surprised she had managed to hit him. He approached her, and she turned her head away, clamped her eyes shut and shot again, striking him in the throat.
He felt blood, momentarily, flow into his esophagus and windpipe, gagging him. The bullet hole healed quickly, but the blood was still there. Hawking it back up, he spat it at her. A huge globule of blood and mucus splatted against the side of her face.
He growled. She had pissed him off.
She sobbed now. The gun had fallen from her hands to the ground and she desperately tried to wipe the sticky, disgusting mass from her face when he reached her.
Picking her up with his hands, he turned and threw her through the window. Glass shattered outward as her body sailed through, out and down. She screamed as she plummeted. Thud. Then silence.
Blain remembered back, not to long ago, when he had thrown a whore through a window in much the same way. My calling card. He snorted. Turning to the rest of the huddled workers he closed on them, lashing out, cutting and tearing. Not so much as to kill any of them, but he left them in a sorry shape.
He left the office to a chorus of screams from his left. A group of workers had tried to flee after he had entered the first office, but he had torn away the handle and the locking mechanism after locking both. The door was inoperable.
Turning, he began stalking toward them. Many of them dashed back into the office they had come from. After the fifth person had made it inside, someone had prematurely closed the door and locked it. Leaving three unlucky individuals outside.
They evaded him for a time, but he ultimately caught them and injured them enough to pass along the lycanthropy. He went back to the office they had come from. What a bunch of wankers. Locking other people out to die. With a short burst of speed and power he shouldered his way in, the door snapping off its hinges and falling inside the office. They would have lived if they hadn’t done that.
Blain left no one alive in the room.
Dripping gore, blood and viscera, Blain marched from the room and back into the central office. There was a dozen more rooms, but Blain had a more specific target. He would return for the rest later. Striding deeper inside, he made his way to the back hallway and located the CEO’s office and burst his way inside.
Four people were here, pressed into the back corner.
Good. They are all in the same place.
The upper level management was all here. Three men and one woman. All marked for death by Kestrel. These ones, in Kestrel’s eyes, were the purveyors of what had been raped and pillaged from this earth.
Who the fuck cares?
Blain certainly didn’t, but it pleased him enough to do her bidding in this. He loved killing in this form. The feel of power, the feeling of invulnerability.
They pleaded with him. Offered him money as he unhurriedly made his way over to them. Mostly they cried, called for help — pissed themselves. It availed them nothing. He tore them to pieces. That was one of the things Kestrel had asked of him.
“When you kill them. Make it bloody. Make it frightening! I want this to be the first message of many. No longer will we tolerate those who oversee the killing of this planet and its wonders,” she had told him.
If he got to kill and spread mayhem, whatever her reasoning, it didn’t matter to him. He wanted to kill. She gave him focus for killing, so it served them both. For now.
After he killed the CEO and the rest. He moved back into the office. It seems he had been gone long enough a group had once again gathered before the outer hall door and were beating on it, trying to get it open.
They had set a lookout and she screamed the moment he rounded the corner. The group turned. Frightened faces s
tared at him as he approached. Women were sobbing and crying. Hell, men were sobbing and crying. Pathetic.
Blain cocked his head. Decided on a different tact.
He shifted back.
Stunned, most of the crying and sobbing ceased. Most.
“People,” he glared at those still crying and made shushing gestures with his hands. After a few moments, the last crying subsided.
“I have a proposal for you,” he began. He saw some of them look at others in the group as if to say, ‘What the fuck?’
He went on. “I am not here to kill you. Though some of you had to die.” He jerked his thumb back the way he had come to indicate the CEO’s office.
“That doesn’t mean the rest of you need to join their fate. So, I’m going to make an offer. I can make you into someone like me. You will have power! You will have strength! No one will be able to hurt you. You will be unstoppable!” He roared, eyes blazing as he glared from one person to the next.
They were murmuring amongst themselves. He could hear the skepticism in their voice.
“But,” he cut in, stopping all discussion. “You must come to me willingly. I will need to draw blood from you, to give you what I have. Just one little cut.” Oh, there was more. Some of them would die when their body tried to fend off the lycanthropy, but no need to let them know that now.
He smiled wickedly at them, and he saw a few of them pale, which made him smile broader. “For those who don’t volunteer. Know I will still cut you, but it won’t be a little.
“You have a minute to decide.”
Many of them turned to the person or persons next to them and began to talk in a mad rush, sounding out what they should do. There were those in the crowd who didn’t talk to anyone. They simply stared at Blain. He stared back.
Those were the first to approach him. They didn’t say anything, only came forward, one at a time and offered up their arm. Blain shifted back to his hybrid form and carefully, almost gently, ran a claw across their skin, cutting them.
These he marked as those he knew would follow him. Would wish to join him. They were the dark ones. The ones who had been mistreated all their lives. Hurt by others and now, when offered a measure of power to fight back, to hurt back, jumped at the chance.
When the first few who had come willingly to him had gone, gradually, the rest, after seeing how he had treated those others, one by one, came to him.
He didn’t treat them as gently.
When they were all done, he moved to the next office and made the same offer to the groups in there, bringing forth one of the volunteers to make his case for him, to convince them. After he had to burst through the door of the first office and taken them all by force, the rest complied.
After he had seen to all the rest, he left them there. The three who had volunteered followed him out and he did nothing to dissuade them.
When he had made it to the lobby, Gordon and Taylor were waiting for him there, returned to their human form.
Gordon turned to him as he exited the elevator.
“We got company.”
Blain could tell. Out the front of the building, through the bank of windows, cop cars were arrayed in a blockade a dozen meters back from the front door. He could see several ambulances beyond them, and he smiled. Good. Though they were going to need a few more of those.
“Taylor?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you see if you can figure out if they have an intercom on the secretary’s phone there?”
Taylor shrugged and made his way around the desk, pausing a moment when the secretary’s body came into view. He quickly glanced away.
Gods, he is such a pussy, Blain thought.
After a moment of examining the phone system Taylor turned to him.
“It doesn’t have an intercom which reaches all the floors, only one which can address each floor individually.”
Blain nodded. It would have to do. Moving over to the desk opposite Taylor he motioned with his hand for Taylor to hand him the phone. Once Taylor gave him the headset, he turned to him.
“First floor.”
Taylor peered down, pressed something, looked back up, and nodded towards Blain.
“Listen up!” His voice poured out of speakers set into the ceiling. “Police and ambulances are out front. So, get the fuck out.”
He nodded to Taylor who again pressed something below before pressing something else, indicating he had accessed second floor, anticipating correctly Blain’s need.
“Hey, the coppers and ambulances are here. So, get out while you can.”
Again, he nodded to Taylor and they repeated the process for the last two floors. As they were finishing up with the final floor, the elevators began to open, and the wounded began to filter out. Some had been injured badly and were being carried by their fellow workers, others had only received minor injuries and walked out on their own.
Every single one of them eyed the trio of them, and their three new recruits with fear and trepidation, as if wondering when they would change back into their monster forms and attack them.
As soon as they exited the building, they ran toward the police, many raising their hands in fear of being thought of as the bad guys and get shot themselves. Police officers were moving forward and waving the injured onward, eyes still locked on the entrance of the building. Of course, the police still had no idea what they were up against. As they began to interview those who made it out, at first there would be disbelief, doubt, maybe some anger at being lied to.
But as more and more of them heard the same stories, their doubt would begin to fade. The unbelievability of what they were being told would begin to move toward reality as they could no longer question what was being said by so many different people. The same stories. The same words. Monsters had attacked them. Horrible creatures who also could become human and turn back again into monsters.
Blain wondered how long it would take for them to decide to call someone who might grasp what the fuck they should do.
Glancing over, he took a moment to look at the ones who had willingly joined him. There were three of them, all men. One a Chinese, Japanese or whatever the fuck Asian country the man was from. Blain could never tell, nor did he actually care. He was a short, squat, roundish little man. He had pale skin with straight jet-black hair, falling straight down from the center of his scalp in clumps, like the fronds of a coconut tree.
He stood there in pale blue button-down shirt and black slacks. One sleeve of his shirt was rolled up to reveal a slight gash in his arm where Blain had cut him. He noticed Blain’s regard and shuffled his feet, met his gaze for a moment before looking down.
The second man was tall and lanky, awkward in the way he stood. he slumped over as if he constantly had to bend over for fear of hitting his head. He wasn’t that tall, though. No. If Blain had to guess it was a physical reaction to having been beat down all his life. It wasn’t slumping, it was shying away. Flinching.
These two had been harassed and picked on all their lives. Blain knew it. Their abuse had turned their minds to hate. To anger. Though they had never had the means to retaliate. Blain had given them an opportunity and they had leapt at the chance.
The third man was a younger man, barely into his twenties. He was broad of shoulders, tall and good looking. He had the look of a rugby team captain or something. Blain doubted he had ever been mocked in his life.
Blain studied him, and the man studied him back, unflinching. Blain gave him one of his smiles, the kind he usually gave people he was about to beat the shit out of. The man paled. That’s better.
Whatever had brought this one forward to his side, Blain didn’t know. Some people were merely born angry, Blain surmised.
“You three. Go with the crowd.” He motioned to the still fleeing mob of people.
“Get out of here. Go to the hospital.”
They were looking at him with confusion.
“There will come a point when your body will try to f
ight off what is happening to it, and you will need medical help.
“So, go. Stay at the hospital until that happens. You will know it when it does. Trust me.”
“What do we do then?” Rugby asked him.
“Don’t worry about it. I will find you. Or you will find me. But, go for now, and hurry. You aren’t ready for what is about to happen.”
They nodded and jogged off after the crowd and filed outside with the rest of them. When they had all left, Blain turned to the Gordon and Taylor.
“You guys ready?”
Gordon smiled, and Taylor contemplated his feet and didn’t respond.
Blain shifted. Gordon followed suit and reluctantly, so did Taylor.
Blain moved past them and began heading toward the exit. The other two followed.
When they exited through the smashed front doorway, the police didn’t hesitate. They opened fire. Who wouldn’t? If three enormous monsters came barreling out of a building where they had killed and injured close to a hundred people, who wouldn’t fire everything they had at them?
Which is precisely what they did.
Blain, who was out front, took the bulk of the initial barrage. He barreled toward the closest cop, but the bullets did little to stop his attack. Still, dozens of bullets struck him all over his body. He could feel their searing entrance into his chest, abdomen, around his face and legs.
The police had their cars between them and the building and the closest car to Blain had three coppers lined up behind it. Blain slammed into it with such force it slid two meters back. One of the policemen was thrown backward to slam against the hood of another car. His back struck it and bent. He slid down to the pavement, unmoving.
The other two were knocked down and the car slid over on top of them, ripping clothes and skin as the undercarriage dragged across their midsections, effectively pinning them underneath.
Gordon had been following directly behind Blain and had launched himself forward in a high sailing jump. Tucking his legs to clear Blain, he stretched them outward and came down hard on top of the car Blain had shoved forward. When he landed on its roof it caved. Windows shattered and tires blew, and the car sank downward from his weight.
The Gathering Page 23