Snake Charmer steps into some familiar territory at this point. I’ve heard many times from many different people how shocking it is to see Jaxon in action. The way he moves and the devastation he causes is apparently quite alarming.
I don’t know if it makes sense to explain. Maybe it’s something you need to see in real life instead of just hear about it, but the guy is scary good. He fights like no man should be able to fight. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again anyway. I’ve seen a lot of violence and action in my time, but he makes the things I’ve seen seem amateurish.
He was just getting started.
Once again, the little girl was followed by the entire nest.
The General didn’t retreat. He didn’t hesitate as they rushed towards us. He wasn’t stunned by their fast movements. He wasn’t concerned as they crawled across the walls and ceiling.
He eagerly met them in a deadly embrace.
His tomahawk twirled in his hands and his black knife flashed up and down as he brought them down one by one. It was really something to see. He didn’t normally kill them with one hit, but he at least injured them enough to render them temporarily harmless. He seemed to have complete situational awareness. Even when they came from behind, he knew. He knew, and he reacted before they could grab a hold of him.
I’m a believer in zombies because I saw them and killed them. I’m a believer in vampires as well for the same reasons. Despite that, I wasn’t a believer in the whole Guardian business until that very moment. Because for the very first time I was seeing a man do something in a fight that I was simply not capable of.
I was watching a master at work.
Maybe that’s wrong.
A master is a mere human at the height of his skills. The General is by no means a mere human. Human beings are not capable of doing the things that he was doing.
All this happened very quickly. It’s not like everyone else sat back and watched. No, we were fighting as well. With the General in the middle of the hallway and Scalp and I at the far end, the big guy moved in between the General and Scalp and I.
The General met the charge and the big guy attacked whatever got behind him with that big axe of his. Scalp and I attacked whatever got behind the big guy. It wasn’t easy. The fighting was vicious, and it wasn’t the type of fighting I was used to. I normally fought with guns and intelligence. If I was in a firefight, I followed the tactics I was trained in and improvised when I needed to. Rarely did I ever need to go hand to hand. This type of fighting brought me out of my element. It was almost medieval.
We were bringing them down. We were succeeding. It was difficult. More than a few times I felt claws scraping against my vest. I heard the material tear from a far off place that wasn’t anywhere near the fighting.
I was getting tired. Scalp was getting tired. The big guy was breathing pretty heavily, and his suit had multiple tears. The General must have noticed this.
“Do you have any flash grenades?” he shouted.
I yelled back that I had one and he told me to set it off in front of him. I pulled the pin and tossed the stunning weapon just a few feet in front of him. It went off with a loud bang and an extremely bright flash of light.
All of us had time to cover our ears and protect our eyes, but it still played havoc on our senses. The General got it the worst. He was down on one knee and using the wall to get back to his feet. Yet, all of us, though banged up, were recovering just fine.
The vampires didn’t fare so well.
The light must have been extremely painful to their eyes. They were all screaming and clutching at their faces. They were running around blindly and slamming their small bodies into the walls of the hallway.
They weren’t interested in attacking us anymore. They simply wanted to retreat. To go back to whatever dark place they felt safe in. I was shocked that they retreated so easily. Then I remembered that they weren’t adults. Whatever they were now, they still had a child’s mentality. We hurt them, and they ran away. An adult might have fought through the pain and continued their attack, but children didn’t think that way.
“Well, that sucked,” said the General. “I was hoping to take out a few at a time since some of them have already fed. I didn’t expect to deal with the whole nest.”
“What the hell are we going to do?” the big guy asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” the General answered. “But I’ll figure it out.”
I realized something about the General immediately. He wasn’t experiencing any adrenaline surge. The rest of us had our hearts pounding in our chests. Our adrenaline was so high at that moment that our hands were shaking. He was completely calm as if he had just woken up from a peaceful nap.
“What does that mean?”
Well, an adrenaline surge is your fight or flight response. It can help save your life, but it also causes a loss of hand and eye coordination. That’s why a lot of gun battles use so much ammunition. The adrenaline surge ruins their aim, and they end up missing shots that they would normally hit very easily.
There have even been some studies that were conducted to find out just how badly it can affect a person’s performance. It also applies to martial artists. Sometimes their coordination suffers in the beginning of a fight, and they can take unnecessary damage.
I have a theory that a lot of the successful gunfighters from the old west somehow controlled their adrenaline. This made them extremely lethal because their aim was never off. My guess is that the General somehow manages this as well. His aim with the tomahawk was absolutely perfect.
“So what does it mean?”
It means that he’s completely lethal. He doesn’t have a fight or flight response. Instead, he has a fight response without an adrenaline surge to damage his chances of success. Or maybe he does experience an adrenaline surge, but somehow he’s hardwired in a way that it doesn’t mess with his coordination, but I doubt it because he was way too calm after the vampires made their retreat.
His earpiece went off. It was a private message, so the rest of us couldn’t hear the conversation. The grin was back on his face.
“We need to get to the roof,” he said. “Miriam finally turned up something with her research and they are going to drop off a present for us.”
It was a relief to hear that they finally had something that would hopefully give us an edge because, despite how well the General could fight, the odds were seriously stacked against us. The only problem at the moment was how we were going to get to the roof in one piece.
The General already had a plan for that.
It wasn’t really very much of a plan, mind you. It consisted of him holding off as many vampires as he could while the rest of us retrieved whatever was about to be dropped onto the roof and then rush back to help him.
Of course, the plan was based upon us being once again attacked by the entire horde. There was a small chance that we’d receive a moments respite from their attacks due to the flash grenade.
We weren’t going from door to door either. Our goal was to find the way to the roof as quickly as possible and then come back to mop things up. It didn’t take but a moment for us to figure out the right direction. The way we needed to go was down a long hallway that led up a short flight of stairs to the metal door of the roof.
We could hear the hungry moans and the sounds of the vampires whispering to one another as we searched for the rooftop exit. We could also hear the sounds of a helicopter coming from outside the building. The sound of the chopper was a relief, but the childlike whispers of the vampires were nerve wracking. The attack was coming. We just didn’t know when.
“What were the vampire children saying?”
“Mother’s milk.”
“They don’t play right.”
“I hate them.”
“Let’s go find them.”
“That man hurt me.”
“I don’t like the light.”
“I’m thirsty.”
Simple t
hings like that. They weren’t exactly capable of any deep thoughts, but it was a relief when we finally started down the long hallway. The sound of the helicopter was already fading into the distance which meant that whatever they sent us had been delivered to the rooftop.
The General brought up the rear as our group rushed towards the metal doors. It was good that he chose that position. The attack was fast. Much faster than anything we had previously seen before. It came from an older kid; possibly he was in his teens. I’m not really sure, but he was way too fast and way too strong.
He crawled along the ceiling leaving claw marks in the plaster as he rushed towards us. His bottom jaw was already elongated and that black ooze was smeared all over his chin. The fangs were what really caught my attention. They were much longer than those of the smaller children.
“Come back here!” the kid screamed at us. “Come back here! I want to talk to you.”
When we reached the small set of stairs leading to the metal door, the General told us to keep going as he turned to face the incoming monster. I saw the tomahawk flash through the air and bite deeply along the vampires back. I saw the vampire drop from the ceiling and land on top of the General and then I was through the door and slamming it shut behind me.
Scalp was rushing towards our package. It wasn’t hard to spot. The small black parachute was floating in the cold wind. Attached to the parachute was a medium sized plastic box. Scalp cut the parachute free, and the big guy opened the box.
It was cold in the open night air, but nowhere near as cold as the dim hallways inside the building.
I stood by the door with my knife just in case the vampire got past the General. I could easily hear the drama unfolding from behind the metal door. The battle was furious. I could hear bodies slamming against the wall. I could hear bones shattering as the tomahawk crunched against them. I could hear the vampire screaming.
Then I heard the screams of others.
They weren’t the hungry moans. No, they were screams of rage. More vampires had joined the fight. No doubt they were attracted by the teenager’s boldness and the sounds of the fight. I knew that the General would be overrun. It was an inevitable outcome.
I didn’t want to go back in there. I didn’t even like the guy, but I wasn’t going to let someone like him die in a dim hallway when he was capable of so much more. I was reaching for the doorknob when the big guy was all of a sudden next to me and pushing a bunch of magazines into my hands.
It took me a moment to understand the situation. At first I couldn’t understand why he would be giving me more ammo when we all knew that normal ammunition was useless. The keyword there was ‘normal’. I saw a glimpse of the ammunition in the mag before I slapped it into my rifle. The bullets were a strange blue color. I’m not talking about the casing mind you. That was regular brass, but the projectile that actually shoots out from the gun was blue.
I had seen that type of blue before.
The big guy opened the door, and we saw a rather nasty scene. The General had killed about five of the vampires, but they just seemed to keep coming at him. There were also three more teenagers.
He was fighting them, but the sheer numbers gave them too much of an advantage. They were trying to surround him, and he was attempting to prevent them.
“Get down,” I shouted as loudly as I could.
The General took a quick look at us. I saw the confusion on his face for a brief moment and then I saw a flash of teeth as he smiled and dropped flat on the floor.
We unloaded on the vampires.
The effect was less than spectacular. The vampires barely reacted to the bullet penetrating their bodies.
“Aim for their chests,” said a woman’s voice through my earpiece.
I believe the voice belonged to the woman named Miriam, but I never asked anyone. I just listened to her advice, as did Scalp Hunter and the big guy. The results were instant.
I plugged one of the teenagers right in his center mass. For a brief moment he tried to take a step towards us then came to a complete stop and looked down at the wound in his chest. I shot him twice more just to be safe. He face planted on the hallway carpet, and I found another target.
The next one was one of the smaller vampire children. I took her down with only one shot. When the bullet impacted with her body, she just sort of sat down, looked at me with the saddest eyes, and dropped over on her side.
The vampires were falling.
For the first time we had the upper hand, and the three of us turned that hallway into a slaughter house. The General was doing a rapid crawl towards us when another teenager went for him. The big guy made a mistake and drilled a hole in the vampire’s forehead instead of shooting him in the chest.
The General couldn’t stand up and defend himself with all the bullets flying over his head and the teenage vampire was rapidly gaining on him. I was just about to take aim on the teenager, when the big guy finally nailed him in the lower chest. The vampire took a step back and then roared at the big guy. On his next step forward, the big guy shot him again.
“STOP THAT!” the vampire screamed. “It hurts!”
The black ooze started to leak from his eyes as he dropped to his knees. The big guy shot him a final time and it was over.
When all was said and done, we brought down seventeen of the vampires.
“What the hell kind of ammo did they give us?” the General asked.
“I’ve seen it before,” I answered. “This coating was used to make poison darts. It dissolves on contact with blood so after the dart was injected into the body, the coating dissolved leaving only the poison to kill the victim.”
The General then grabbed a single bullet and dipped it in some of that black vampire blood. The coating dissolved immediately, leaving behind a hollow pointed wooden bullet.
“You gotta be kidding me,” the big guy said. “A wooden bullet won’t mushroom out, it will splinter.”
“I think that’s the idea,” the General said. “The splinters puncture the heart in several places, and it drops the vampire. It might take a few shots to get enough splinters in the heart, but apparently the old stake through the heart trick actually works.”
“But a wooden bullet wouldn’t actually shoot very well,” I added. “Therefore they coat it in that blue gunk in order to make it denser for distance and to also keep it from breaking apart when it exits the barrel.”
“Load up then boys,” the General said. “We’re going back in.”
It was when we walked past the dead vampires that we realized they weren’t actually dead. They were frozen and immobile. They were in obvious pain, but they weren’t dead. Some of them had even started a low whimper. Others had started a low moan. A few of them had the black tears running down their faces.
The General tapped his earpiece.
“Are you seeing this?” the General asked.
It was a private conversation, so the rest of us weren’t privy to the details, but when it was over the General let out a deep sigh.
“Research indicated that wood through the heart was effective,” said the General. “The research did not say how effective it was, only that the heads were always removed after the staking.”
“I guess we now know why,” I added. “The stakes probably just immobilized them and hurt like the devil, but they don’t kill them.”
“Sunlight and fire are also supposed to work,” the General said as he once again pulled out his tomahawk.
It would have been easy to let him do the dirty work himself. I really didn’t want to participate. Once immobilized, the vampire children lost all aspects of their true nature and appeared only as terrified children. In the end, all of us aided in the task. It’s something that I try not to think about too much.
When we were finished, we broke down the rest of the doors.
We hunted down the vampires. There was no place that was safe for them. We shot them down in closets. We pulled them out from under beds. We found them
in the shadows. We destroyed the nest.
One thing we noticed was that the older the child, the stronger and more lethal they were as well. The oldest among them also required a lot more bullets to the chest before they went down.
“You said that the vampire hunting you was an adult?” Scalp asked after all of us unloaded our weapons on the last of the teenagers and chased him down two flights of stairs before he finally dropped.
“That’s right,” the General answered. “An adult female, and from what I can tell, she’s a lot tougher than these little ones.”
“I don’t envy you at all,” Scalp said with a laugh.
“That’s okay,” the General replied. “I don’t envy me much either, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna kill her.”
After that it was more room searching and shooting. It took a fair amount of time even with all of us firing, but eventually we cleaned the entire hotel. We even went down to the basement. It was clear of vampires, but it held some bodies, and Scalp and I found what was left of Voodoo. None of the bodies belonged to the General’s friend.
I could tell he was worried, but he didn’t say much about it.
Since the hotel was cleaned out, Scalp and I radioed in for our extraction. We were leaving by way of the rooftop.
“After going through what you went through, you were still being extracted?”
Those were our orders. The higher ups wanted none of the special teams on the ground until the vampire threat was neutralized. I didn’t have any ill feelings because of it either. The vampires we dealt with were more than a match for us. I heartily agree with what Scalp said about not envying the General. I’ll take human threats any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
When the helicopter came, Scalp shook the General’s hand and thanked him for the assist. After I thought about it for a moment, I realized that I wouldn’t have made it out of the building without his aid and offered my hand as well.
He shook it immediately, and I leaned forward to whisper in his ear.
“What did you say?”
I told him that I still owed him for slapping my helmet, and one of these days I was going to give him some payback.
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