“Hospital!” Acheson shouted. He spun to his left and ran down the sidewalk. The others followed.
“Mark! What should I do about this man?”
Acheson glanced back. Ellenshaw stood with his hand on Patrick’s arm. “Cut him loose!”
“Two-Six, this is SHADOW. Ah… be advised the three hostiles just entered the hospital, over.”
“Which entrance did they use, SHADOW?”
“Ah, Two-Six… this might sound crazy, but they climbed up the side of the building and entered through one of the third floor windows, over.”
Despite the tension, Acheson had to grin. There was a macabre humor to Zaslow’s attempt to make the inexplicable sound routine.
“Roger that, SHADOW. Resume your orbit, we’ll take it from here. Two-Six, out.”
“Yo, Mark, what do we do with our guns, man?” Cecil asked as the team ran after Acheson. “We can’t just waltz into a hospital with ‘em, can we?”
“We’re way past that now,” Acheson replied. “Let’s tag the vamps first, and then deal with the fallout.”
Acheson ran up to the glass entry doors. As they slid open he shoved his way past a clutch of medical workers on their way out. One of them complained when Cecil shouldered her aside, but her objections trailed off when she saw the big machinegun he carried.
A rent-a-cop sitting behind a small wooden desk shot to his feet when the armed team stormed inside. He wore a pistol on his right hip, and his hand twitched toward it. Acheson made a beeline toward him.
“Don’t,” Acheson warned. “We’re Homeland Security. There’s a major threat inside the hospital, and we’re here to take care of it. You need to tell me what’s on the third floor.”
“Uh…” The security guard looked from Acheson, to Cecil, to Sharon, and back to Acheson. “What threat…?”
Acheson shot a look at Ellenshaw. “Robert, baby sit this man and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. The rest of you, with me.”
“Hey, hold on!” the rent-a-cop yelled as the team headed for the stairs. He reached for the telephone, but Ellenshaw gently placed his hand over it.
“Please sit down,” he said, making sure the guard saw the MP-5 slung over his shoulder.
“Are you guys for real?” he asked, easing back down into his chair. His voice was so soft that Ellenshaw could barely hear him.
Ellenshaw smiled. “We’re very, very real.”
***
The hospital was massive, and the third floor turned out to be an active ward for treating patients. The stairwells ran through the center of the hospital, right next to one of the elevator bays. When the team emerged from the stairwell, they had just as much territory to reconnoiter to the right as to the left.
Acheson signaled for them to split up. Chiho took her team to the left, while Acheson led the others to the right. Within moments, they found the vampires’ entry point. The room was dark and still, a cool evening breeze wafting through the shattered windows. The tattered drapes lay on the floor, and the single bed had been shoved aside.
“Mark.”
Acheson turned. Sharon stood at a vacant nurse’s station, looking over the desk. Acheson joined her.
Two female nurses were on the floor behind the counter. Their purple medical scrubs were shredded, and droplets of dark blood stood out against their ivory skin. Their eyes were open but unseeing. The ghouls had fed. Overhead, one of the ceiling tiles had been torn free. Acheson leaped onto the desk and poked the AA-12’s barrel into the dark space. He grimaced and shook his head.
“Gone,” he said, jumping back to the floor. He pulled his machete from his belt and beheaded the corpses.
“Anyone see a directory?” He asked as he surveyed the nurse’s station.
“I know where they’re headed,” Sharon said in a small voice. She pointed at a sign painted on the wall across from the nurse’s station. Acheson read it and sheathed his machete.
“Oh, fuck.” He turned and ran back the way they had come.
***
“Maternity! They’re headed for maternity!”
Rick Wallace heard the tension in Acheson’s voice through his headset earpiece, and he fully understood why. At the moment, he was staring through a pane glass window at a room full of newborns. Most slept; a few stirred in their bassinets. All were various shades of pink, and all were cute as hell. Newborns would attract the vamps like bees to honey. The thought chilled him to the bone.
On the other side of the glass, a maternity nurse stared at him with wide eyes. Two others stood behind him at the nearby nurse’s station, gaping at the three armed women and one armed man who had made their way down the hallway as if they were in the middle of a military combat mission.
“Two-Six, this is Two-Five. We’re at the maternity section,” Chiho said. She turned to the two nurses standing nearby: “You need to get these children out of here. Now.”
The first nurse, a woman in her later years, looked at Chiho with hard eyes. “If you harm any of them, you’ll be sorry.”
Julia flashed the woman her Homeland Security ID. “Do as we tell you—move the kids right…”
Claudia gasped and whirled, looking down the hallway they had just charged up. Rick pivoted, bringing his MP-5 to his shoulder. There was nothing there.
“If anyone’s going to do something, now would be a great time to do it,” he said.
“Move the children!” Julia snapped at the nurses. She also raised her MP-5 as Chiho grabbed Claudia by the elbow and led her away from the nursery.
The older nurse was unimpressed. “Where would you have us move them to, sweetheart?” She was a round woman, from head to toe, and her demeanor was more like that of a strict schoolmarm than a tender maternity nurse. Rick wondered if she tended to the newborns or merely terrorized them.
One of the overhead hallway lights flickered. Rick zeroed in on it. The light flickered again, and a nearby ceiling tile flexed.
“They’re above us!”
As he spoke, the ceiling in the nursery collapsed inward and a small, pallid form descended upon the nurse there like a grotesque four-legged spider. She had barely enough time to scream before the figure drove her to the floor, sending several of the bassinets careening through the room on their caster wheels. The other nurses shrieked. From the corner of his eye, Rick could see the old schoolmarm nurse piss her scrubs as the younger one dashed toward the nursery. Rick drifted to his left and tagged her with his shoulder, knocking her down.
“You go in there, you’re dead,” he told her. He zeroed his sights on the ghoul in the nursery, but he didn’t have a good shot as it hunched over the nurse. Her legs kicked and twitched in an autonomous dance. She’d been fanged.
Ceiling tiles exploded again, this time behind Rick. Two more ghouls dropped into the hall, snarling. The older nurse shrieked as one of them slashed at her face and neck with its fangs. The second one was driven back by a volley of 9mm fire from Julia McGuiness’s MP-5.
“I’ve got this one!” she shouted, advancing toward the ghoul, plastering it with another burst from her weapon.
Chiho leaped toward the vamp clinging to the older woman, her machete in her right hand. “Rick, take care of the one in the nursery! Hurry!”
Rick Wallace hesitated. Operationally, no team member was to confront a vamp one-on-one without a backup. But Chiho and Julia were decisively engaged, and Claudia Nero was technically a noncombatant. His training ran deep, and he knew for certain that going in after the ghoul in the nursery alone was to set foot on an avenue toward death.
At the same time, watching the vamp shamble toward one incubator with its demonic eyes fixed on the infant within tweaked at something inside him, something primal. He couldn’t turn his back on the babies inside the nursery.
The ghoul reached into the incubator and picked up the infant. The vamp’s black eyes twinkled with the closest thing to glee it could approximate. The child emitted a high-pitched scream.
That was all i
t took. Rick kicked open the nursery’s locked door and stepped inside the warm room. He popped off two rounds into the vamp’s skull with unerring accuracy. The vampire grunted and collapsed like a sack of potatoes between two rows of incubators. The infant rolled out of the vampire’s hands, still shrieking. The rest of the babies in the room added their voices to the fray, as if sensing the evil that had invaded their serene domain. The infant on the floor flailed its arms and legs weakly, hollering away. Rick kept his attention fixed on the vampire lying supine before him. He fired a three-round burst into its chest as he advanced, and the vampire shuddered. It snarled, raising its hands toward its head. The wounds inflicted by the double 9 millimeter rounds healed so rapidly that Rick could see them closing up. He fired another burst at the creature, and two rounds shattered its right cheekbone as they penetrated the chalky flesh and burrowed deeply into its skull. The third slapped through the vampire’s right ear, and black ichor oozed from the impact point. The beast’s snarl turned to a choked gurgle, and its hands fell back to the floor. The wounds were healing much more slowly now, thanks to the silver halide that coated each round. Rick fumbled in his knapsack with one hand, trying to retrieve a stake while keeping his MP-5 trained on the vampire.
“Need some help in here!” he shouted.
The vampire stirred and turned its face toward him. Rick averted his gaze and fired at it. Despite standing only a few steps away, two of the rounds missed, disappearing into the floor beside the vampire. The third perforated its thorax, doing minimal damage. Rick hissed through his teeth and took one step back. He grabbed the MP-5 with both hands and fired two more bursts into the vamp’s face, then added a third for good measure. The vampire went slack again. Rick allowed his weapon to hang from his shoulder by its patrol strap. Using both hands, he pulled a stake from the knapsack. Outside the nursery, he heard the muffled retorts of Chiho and Julia’s MP-5s as they went up against the two vampires in the hallway.
Let’s get this over with.
The vampire leapt to its feet with an ululating roar, almost moving faster than Rick’s mind could register. It lunged toward him, hands outstretched, fingers spread like talons, mouth agape, fangs bared. Instead of falling back, Rick leaped toward it and slammed the stake into the base of its neck. He followed through with a vicious uppercut from his left hand. Supernatural capabilities couldn’t prevent the vampire from being momentarily overwhelmed. It was only slightly more than five feet tall, with a proportionate body mass. Rick, standing at well over six feet and weighing almost twice what the vampire did, was in a much better defensive position. The vampire absorbed all the energy from Rick’s punch and it sailed backwards. Its teeth slammed together, and to Rick’s satisfaction it bit off the tip of its black tongue.
“Yeah, baby!” He shouldered the MP-5 and planted his feet. The vamp scrabbled about on the floor, shrieking as it tried to pull the stake from its neck. The din sent up by the infants mingled with the howls of the wounded vampire, threatening to overwhelm Rick’s concentration. He shut out everything and focused on his thrashing target.
The ceiling above him gave way and something struck his right shoulder as he fired. The three-round burst missed the vampire entirely, the bullets shattering a cabinet door on the far side of the room. Rick spun as a black-clad figure alighted beside him. His hip bumped an incubator, knocking it askew and further distressing its tiny occupant. The infant the vampire had taken a few moments ago was practically underfoot. But all of this was background noise in Rick’s mind. What commanded his attention was the tall, almost stately vampire before him. Even out of the corner of his eye he could discern this one was no mere ghoul. It had long, dark hair swept back from its pale forehead, a slightly crooked nose, and the kind of full, sensuous lips that would have driven girls wild if they weren’t on a dead man. Rick continued to spin, bringing his MP-5 to bear. The tall vampire smiled as it reached out and grabbed the weapon. Metal squealed as cold fingers compressed the upper receiver, effectively destroying the submachinegun.
“Most unsporting, my friend,” the vampire said. Its voice had a subtle accent, suggestive of Italian or Spanish descent.
Rick swung at the vampire’s head with all his might. The blow landed square and true, but the vampire only swayed slightly. In response, it seized Rick by the neck and lifted him off the floor.
***
Julia McGuiness fired nonstop at the two vampires, attacking first one, then the other, driving them back. Chiho followed close behind with her pike ready. She glanced behind them, and realized they had traveled almost thirty feet from the nursery. She put a hand on Julia’s back.
“They’re separating us from Rick and Claudia—”
Glass exploded as Rick Wallace flew through the nursery window and slammed across the desk at the nurse’s station. His momentum carried him onto the floor, taking the computer monitor, keyboard, and dozens of files with him. Farther down the hallway, Claudia shrieked, her hands flying to her face.
“Fall back!” Chiho said.
“Look out!” Julia fired her MP-5 on full automatic. Chiho turned back to the vampires as they rushed forward and slammed into Julia like linebackers sacking a quarterback. Chiho brought her pike up and jabbed at one of the vampires, catching it in the shoulder. It shrieked, but slapped the pike aside as it drove Julia into her. Julia emptied her clip into the vamp’s waist at point-blank range, but it didn’t slow down. Both vampires crawled over the women and charged down the hallway.
Julia rolled off Chiho and ripped the spent magazine from her weapon. Chiho spun on one knee and fired at the vampires as they charged toward Claudia. The weapon rocked back and forth in the small woman’s hands, its butt slapping into her shoulder.
“Claudia, stay down!” she shouted over the MP-5’s muted rumble. Claudia cowered in wide-eyed terror as the two ghouls darted past her, staggering as the bullets tore through their bodies.
“Two-Six, Two-Five! Ghouls headed your way!” Chiho said into her headset. She pulled the magazine from her MP-5 and jacked another into place. Julia loped toward the nursery in a crouch, the barrel of her MP-5 leading the way. Chiho was only a few steps behind.
A well-manicured vamp dressed in black from head to toe stepped out of the nursery right in front of Julia. It grimaced when she fired into its chest at a range of four feet. The rounds passed through its body and tore into the savaged window frame that overlooked the nursery. Babies howled as glass tinkled across the floor.
The vamp slapped Julia with an arcing backhand. Julia cried out as she was flung into the wall with enough force to crack the sheetrock, bouncing off it like a doll. She collapsed to the floor face-first and did not move.
Chiho was too late in avoiding the vampire’s gaze. Even as she commanded her finger to pull the MP-5’s trigger, the vampire’s will penetrated her, kicked open the door to her mind, and nudged her away from its controls.
Rest, it told her. Relax… and rest.
Against her will, Chiho’s eyes closed, and she sank to the floor.
10
Sharon ranged ahead of Acheson with great bounding strides. She’d always been able to outrun anyone on the team, besting them all in speed and endurance. But this time there was a peculiar purpose to her dash, and she ran head down, full out, as if she were competing in a field and track event as opposed to closing in on Mankind’s worst enemy.
“Sharon!” Acheson called out as she neared the last corner that would bring them in sight of the other team and the maternity ward. “Slow down!”
Sharon only speeded up. As she rounded the corner, she slammed headlong into the first vampire, sending it careering into the opposite wall. The second one leaped over her with a snarling yowl as Sharon tumbled across the tiled floor. She slammed into a plastic waste basket and sent it flying. Her MP-5 tangled in its strap around her, pulled tight against her back. She went for her pistol and raised it toward the vamp she’d collided with. It glared at her and bounded away before she could get off
a shot.
Around the corner, all hell broke loose as Acheson, Cecil, and Nacho opened up on the vamps. Sharon backpedaled as she was pelted with bits and pieces of sheetrock, metal studs, and insulation.
“Two-Six, what do want me to do?” she shouted into her headset microphone.
“Get to the other team!” Acheson responded. “We’ll take care of these things and be there as quick as we can!”
Sharon holstered her pistol and straightened out her MP-5 as she got to her feet. “Roger that,” she said.
Down the corridor, she saw a man in black standing over Claudia Nero. Beyond her, Chiho lay curled up in a ball on the floor. Farther down the hall, Julia McGuiness was sprawled face down on the floor. The man hovering over Claudia was not Rick Wallace.
It was a master-class vampire.
The vampire nodded to her and waited, hands clasped behind its back. Sharon approached slowly, eyes low.
“Three-Zero to Two-Six—how’s it going back there?” she asked.
“Three-Zero, Two-Six. Still engaged. What’s the SITREP from your side, over?”
“Team’s down,” Sharon said. “I’m about to go head-to-head with a master-class vampire, over.”
“Three-Zero, do not engage, I say again, do not engage! Wait for us to—”
Sharon pulled off her headset and dropped it to the floor. Firming her grip on her MP-5, she walked toward the vampire that towered over Claudia. Claudia was on her hands and knees, her weapon lying on the floor before her. She trembled like a frightened child. The vampire waited for Sharon, as a subtle smile tugged at its lifeless lips.
More vampires dropped out of the battered ceiling in the nursery. One had been a high-society soccer mom, still wearing her low-rise jeans and Banana Republic T-shirt. Another could have been a bum from the Santa Monica Pier area, for even in death, his skin had the burnt, lived-in look of the homeless. They paid her no mind as they picked up the bawling infants and tucked them under their arms as if they were loaves of bread.
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