Helena grew enraged. “They mock us,” she hissed, her voice barely audible above the music.
“Now, now, my darling,” Osric cooed. “Don’t become too upset. After all, they do objectify us to a degree, and who could take issue with that?”
He glanced over his shoulder at Stahl, looming right behind him. “Take Marie and begin at the back. Ensure no one escapes through the rear door. Feed with abandon, and purge if you must in order to feed again. Do you understand?”
Stahl nodded his large head once.
“François, you and Sagan shall remain with us,” Osric said, this time to the slight, pale blond-haired man standing behind Stahl along with a slender, taller vampire. Both of them looked around, noses wrinkled in disgust at the strange scents and thundering sound of the music.
“As you wish, Master,” François responded with a slight bow. He rubbed his hands together and glanced at the mass of bodies swaying rhythmically on the dance floor. “So many… surely some will escape?”
Osric smiled lightly. “They have no chance against us,” he said. “You remember Versailles, my friend?”
François smiled and nodded. The music began to fade, and Osric looked to a woman at the back of the group. “Antoinette, my darling, do watch the door for us, yes?”
“When will I be able to hunt?” she asked, pouting.
“Not to worry. More than a few will come your way,” Osric replied. “Stahl, you and Marie get into your positions. We’ll start in just a moment.”
Stahl nodded silently, then reached behind him and grabbed Marie’s wrist. He towed her along behind him, her small legs working overtime to keep pace.
“Are you ready, darling Helena?” As he cupped her face in his hands, Osric saw the blood lust rising as her expression morphed into something feral.
“Wow, that’s awesome,” said a young woman wearing a black crepe dress and small fake fangs. “Those teeth look absolutely hot!”
“Yours could stand a bit of work,” Osric said. “Allow us to assist you. Helena…?”
Helena spun away from Osric and slammed into the woman in black, driving her to the floor with such ferocity that nearby revelers were knocked back. The woman shouted as she tried to push Helena off her, then screamed when she felt the bite of real fangs. Osric sighed. Helena hadn’t bothered to hypnotize the woman first.
“Still some work to be done with you, darling,” he muttered. Then louder, to the people who were beginning to react to the scene unfolding before them, “You say you want to be vampires?” Osric’s voice boomed as if artificially amplified, even louder than the dance music, which was beginning to pick up again. “Then offer yourselves to me, little sheep, and perhaps you shall!”
The vampires closed in, fangs glittering, eyes gleaming, as their prey tried to escape. Those who tried to fight back were hopelessly outmatched. When Osric and the other vampires allowed the bloodlust to overcome them, they were as unstoppable as a hurricane, and many times more lethal.
Hours later, the trucks would come. And dozens of corpses would be transported through the night to safety, where they would awaken and join the ranks of the Undead.
***
Sharon lay on her bed in the tank, staring at the overhead. While the rest of the team worked the night away sifting through intelligence, she was left alone in near silence. The lights outside the tank had been dimmed, and most of the medical technicians were in the small dormitory at the far end of the complex. For the time being, Sharon had the market cornered on peace and quiet.
Not that she was completely alone. When the feelings of distant bloodlust registered on her consciousness, it was disconcerting and quite alarming. Her heart pounded, despite her best efforts to control it. The electrocardiogram monitoring her would doubtless detect the elevated heart rate and summon one of the medical assistants. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The absolute thirst that accompanied the sudden sensation was almost overpowering. Sharon squeezed her eyes shut, but she could do nothing to close the eye of her mind. Across that flickered images of death and terror, jumbled, nonsensical fragments that stirred her consciousness in a way that was wholly alien to her… and that at the same time felt totally right.
Oh God, help me. They’re feeding. Osric is feeding…
The door to the tank clicked open as one of the medics stepped inside. She wore a surgical mask. Sharon didn’t recognize her, but that wasn’t surprising. Like everyone on the Containment Team, she hadn’t really interacted with the personnel at the Plant.
“Is everything all right, Sharon?” the woman asked, bringing up the lights. She glanced at the electrocardiogram’s display and reached for the chart at the foot of the bed.
“I’m all right,” Sharon said. Her voice was hoarse, and she felt lightheaded.
“Your heart rate’s through the roof,” the medic said. “Let me take your blood pressure.”
“I’m just having a little panic attack,” Sharon said.
“Let’s see if we can fix that. Sit up for me?”
Sharon slowly sat up in bed and swept the sheet aside. She swung her legs over the side. Her feet dangled just above the cold tile floor. She wore a T-shirt and blue sweatpants. The medic unclipped the sphygmomanometer from the wall, wrapped the Velcro cuff around Sharon’s upper right arm, and slipped her stethoscope’s earpieces into her ears.
“This will just take a second,” she said. The medic played with the sphygmomanometer for a few moments, eying a gauge before slowly deflating the cuff. She hung her stethoscope around her neck and replaced the sphygmomanometer on its wall clips.
“It’s elevated,” she said as she picked up the clipboard from the foot of the bed and jotted something down. “Are you having trouble sleeping? Would you like something to help you sleep?”
Sharon shrugged. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”
“I’ll check with Dr. Kerr.” The skin around the medic’s eyes crinkled as she smiled beneath her mask. “But before I do that, I’ll need to take another blood specimen. Sorry.”
Sharon held out her arm with a sigh. “What a surprise.”
The medic busied herself with the preparations to draw the blood. Sharon stared at the far wall—through the far wall actually, as it was transparent Plexiglas—and worked on controlling her breathing. By concentrating, she found she could bring the strange impulses under some degree of control. Her heart rate slowed to its normal rhythm. A small wave of elation crested inside her chest.
Not so strong just yet, Osric. I can still block you out, you bastard—even when you’re feeding. But that wouldn’t be the case for long, and she knew it.
She remained damned.
7
“Mark? Mark, wake up. We’ve got something!”
Acheson snapped to. He rubbed his eyes—God, how they burned!—and realized he’d fallen asleep at his desk in the small office he’d taken over at the Plant. His laptop screen was dark—the computer had gone into hibernation mode. He glanced at his watch and frowned. He’d been out for almost an hour.
“Mark?”
Acheson looked up at Julia. She looked perfectly presentable for someone who’d been up for almost forty-eight hours. Acheson wondered how she did it.
“What’ve you got?” he asked. His voice was raspy.
“This just came in from Dietrick a few minutes ago.” Julia handed him a printout. He took it from her and stared at it. The print seemed to swim before his eyes for a moment before he could make sense of the words.
“RMA virus was found in a body?” he asked. “Where?”
“At the L.A. County Coroner’s. Five of them, all gang-bangers with MS13. They were taken down during an anti-gang operation, practically right in front of the cops. No good guys got fanged, only the gang members.” Julia slipped her hands into the pockets of her indigo jeans. “Happened in Hawthorne… three nights ago, Mark.”
Acheson looked up at her. “Three nights ago?” He glanced at his watch again. It was a quarte
r after six in the evening. Sun’s already down.
“The coroner’s department is at the USC Medical Center. It’s on the hospital campus,” Julia continued. “They’ve got everything there, Mark—trauma center, intensive care, everything. It’ll be like a la carte service for those ghouls when they wake up.”
“What’s the traffic like?” Acheson asked.
“Rush hour—it’s a mess, like always.”
Acheson rose to his feet. “Get the team together. We’re going to have to go in quick. Fiedler got us a helicopter—let’s use it.”
***
For Chief Warrant Officer 4, Andy Zaslow, Los Angeles was a welcome respite from the frigid weather that had socked in his home base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The sprawling Army base that was home to the fabled 101st Airborne Division had fallen victim to a sudden October cold snap that had all the troops grumbling and complaining. Not that the adverse weather was terribly oppressive. It was second nature for soldiers to bitch about something, and the weather gave them an obvious excuse. But Zaslow had never been one to favor cold weather, and when the mission came for his crew to self-deploy their MH-60M Black Hawk to Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles County, he had practically jumped for joy.
And it had been light duty, for sure. During the day, Zaslow and his aircrew were free to do whatever they wished, so long as they remained available at all hours. That wasn’t a hard thing to manage. After all, they weren’t part of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) for fun times in the sun. They were called the Night Stalkers for a simple reason—they mainly flew and fought under the cover of darkness.
Just the same, Zaslow had used the daylight hours to his advantage. He’d toured the great beaches, Hollywood, the Griffith Observatory (he’d been a fan of Rebel Without a Cause, which was filmed there), Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive (it wasn’t quite as exciting as it had appeared in Beverly Hills Cop), and had even bought a map to the homes of the stars from a street vendor. That had been fairly disappointing, however. He’d hoped to see Jay Leno’s spread up close and personal, but from the street there’d been nothing to see. Chances were good that the Leno residence would be harder to see than the inside of the Night Stalker’s regimental operations center. That had been a letdown, but with the perpetually sunny weather, it was a disappointment he could tolerate.
But all good things came to an end. Now he was riding shotgun while his copilot, CW3 Tony Danvers, piloted the rented Ford Taurus up Woodley Avenue toward the Van Nuys Airport. In the back, Sergeant Willie Johnson and Sergeant Hector Ramirez—crew chief and gunner, respectively—sat in subdued silence. All four men wore their Nomex flight suits and had their duffel bags between their feet. In each bag was an SPH-5 helmet, a pair of ANVIS-6 night vision goggles, and personal weapons, a nine millimeter Beretta 92F pistol and a Heckler & Koch MP-7 submachinegun. All the weapons were licensed, of course, but Zaslow knew it would take an act of God to convince any of the local law enforcers that everything was copasetic. For that reason, Danvers drove the rented Ford like an old lady, slow and timid.
“So what’s the op?” Danvers asked finally as they approached the airport.
“We pull pitch and head for a warehouse over in some town called Alhambra. We pick up our customers there, then head to the USC Medical Center.” Zaslow patted one of his flight suit’s cargo pockets. “I’ve already got the GPS info and plotted it out on the map. It’s a milk run both ways.”
“Medical center, huh? Is this a MEDEVAC mission?” Danvers asked. He flipped on the left turn signal as they approached the airport entrance.
“Insertion,” Zaslow told him.
“An insertion at a hospital, Mr. Zas?” asked Johnson.
Zaslow shrugged. “I take orders just like you, Willie.”
“Well, that’s fine with me,” Johnson said. He hailed from East Texas, and he could drawl with the best of them, Zaslow thought. “We get some more hours in, plus I’ll bet this town is somethin’ to see from the sky when it’s all lit up.”
“And it’s not even smoggy tonight,” Danvers added. “Might be a nice night for a milk run, so long as those traffic choppers stay the heck out of our way.”
***
Despite the urgency of the situation, the Containment Team had time to kill. SHADOW FLIGHT wouldn’t be onstation for at least fifteen minutes, and Acheson took the opportunity to brief the team on what would be going down. They would need to make some compromises. Nacho’s dogs couldn’t be transported by air. They had only a sketchy layout of the buildings on the medical center campus and almost nothing on the coroner’s building itself. Julia’s team of analysts had mined for that data and come up short. The plans they’d found were outdated, as the coroner’s building had been revamped in the 1990s. It was a blind jump, but they were professionals, and they’d done this sort of thing before. They gathered their gear, donned jackets, and waited in the dark, chilly parking lot. A handful of stars burned overhead, cold and distant like the love of God.
Acheson found Sharon standing apart from the group, staring at the horizon. There wasn’t much to see. The lowlying buildings and homes that made up Alhambra offered a mundane visual tableau. She started when he touched her shoulder.
“Nervous?” Acheson asked. Through the hand on her shoulder he could feel the tension radiating from her body as if it were a physical thing.
“Sorry,” Sharon said softly.
“You up for this? Tell me straight up if you’re not, because this whole thing is going to get weirder by the second.”
“I’m fine, Mark. You don’t have to worry.”
Acheson nodded as he looked down at her. Her face was masked in shadow, as the floodlights from the warehouse weren’t bright enough to reveal details, only shapes. Her eyes gleamed in the wan light, and her gaze kept straying to the western horizon.
“You feel Osric?” he asked after a moment.
Sharon nodded. “I can feel his presence. It’s becoming distinct. It has its own signature. But I have no idea what he’s doing, what he’s thinking, what he’s up to.”
“Can you feel any of the other vamps?”
Sharon looked back at the horizon again and nodded. “Like one big mass on a radar screen. I can’t differentiate between them, but they’re there. Between us and the sun.”
“To our west,” Acheson said. “That helps us out a bit.”
Sharon shrugged. “Maybe Claudia can tell you more.”
Acheson shook his head. “I already asked. She can’t feel any of them.”
“There are a lot of them,” Sharon whispered.
“Do you think if we get closer to the AO your impressions will be clearer?”
“We’ll have to see.” Sharon paused. “I don’t think he can block me out, Mark. I think this is part of what happens to the vamps. They’re so attuned to their master that it’s part of their… biology. He couldn’t block me out any more than I could will my heart to stop beating.”
“All right,” Acheson said. “That’s good to know.”
“Don’t tell Kerr about this,” Sharon whispered. “I don’t want him to know that I’m getting closer to Turning.”
Acheson put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward him. She resisted slightly, not wanting to remove her eyes from the horizon. This concerned him a bit. Was Osric’s presence something she simply was aware of, or was it more like a siren’s call, something she had little power to resist?
“Sharon,” he said softly. When she kept her head craned toward the western horizon, he put the steel of command in his voice. “Sharon!”
Finally she turned to him, her eyes downcast. Acheson cupped her chin in one hand and gently raised her face toward his. Nonetheless, she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“You’re going to make it through this,” Acheson told her. “Believe me.”
Sharon nodded, still not looking at him. Her voice was small when she spoke.
“If I start to Turn, you have to kill me.” She fin
ally met his gaze. “Promise me you’ll do that, Mark, so I don’t become one of those things. I want to be killed while I’m still human.”
It was Acheson’s turn to look away. “Sharon,” he gasped. “I—I…”
“You said you loved me,” she whispered. “If you love me, please, please save me from that.”
Acheson clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. Suddenly he pulled her into his arms. She stiffened in response, putting her hands on his chest as if she wanted to push away—but she didn’t.
“I do love you, Sharon,” he affirmed, his voice thick with emotion. “And that’s why it’s so Goddamned tough to agree to do what you’re asking me.”
“Just save me from that, Mark. Please.”
Acheson’s vision went blurred with welling tears as the terrible weight of what she was asking of him finally settled on his shoulders. There was no way he could deny her. To allow her to become one of the Undead would destroy him as well.
“I promise,” he gasped. “I’ll do it.”
Slowly, Sharon slipped her arms around him. She rested her head against his chest, and some of the tension drained out of her.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
Acheson said nothing in return. He had given his word, and in order to save them both he would have to keep it. He kissed the top of her head and inhaled the scent of her hair. He recalled how it had been between them, how the good times had been quite good and the bad times not as terrible as he once thought.
I’ve been such a fool.
“Please forgive me… but Mark, we need to talk,” Ellenshaw said from nearby. Acheson straightened, and Sharon released him. She smiled up at him through the darkness.
“Time to go back to work,” she said.
Acheson smiled back and turned to Ellenshaw. Ellenshaw looked embarrassed, his hands shoved into the pockets of his dark gray utility pants.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“No problem, Robert.” Acheson looked past him at the rest of the team. They all leaned against the warehouse, staring out across the parking lot. Chiho met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. Acheson wondered how he would make his way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into.
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