“What did he say to that?”
He said that I should feel free to look him up anytime I wanted to get my ass kicked.
Chapter 7
Jaxon
Jaxon was tired when I next met with him. The entire team had started their morning on a long distance run. As always, good cardio seems to be very important to him. After the run, they worked on hand to hand combat and completed their morning at the shooting range.
This isn’t anything new to the team. Every member spends countless hours in training. If they aren’t fighting, you can bet they’re busy training to fight. Most of them don’t mind the long hours. They are working hard on skills that will save their life or the lives of their teammates.
“So, I spoke to Snake Charmer.”
Wow, I’m shocked you were able to track him down. You must have some important friends.
“I’ve been meeting some interesting people, that’s for sure. He said that you smacked him over the head and then drew on Scalp Hunter.”
Yeah, that’s true.
“Can you tell me why?”
He was acting like an asshole. I mean, I could have just radioed in to Hardin and taken over his team, but he never would have respected me. By proving that I could take both of them out let them know what I was capable of. My actions made me credible.
“You wanted to intimidate him so that he would follow your orders?”
Not at all. I wanted to prove to him that I was legitimate. He didn’t believe in me; he thought I was a joke. I showed them that my reputation was deserved and that I had even more right to be in El Paso than they did.
“What if one of them had shot you?”
I’ve been shot before.
“Yes, I guess you have. Well, what was it like working with highly trained fighting men?”
I prefer working with the Regulators. Don’t get me wrong: those guys have skills, and if I needed to rescue a hostage or take down a terrorist they’d be the guys I wanted with me, but I fight monsters. I fight nasty biting and scratching monsters that can disembowel a man with a simple backhand. I want the boys that are most experienced with fighting monsters to have my back. It just so happens that my team is probably the most experienced in the world right now.
Guys like Scalp Hunter and Snake Charmer aren’t exactly trained for the kinds of things we take on. To be honest, we aren’t always trained for the kinds of things we take on. However, we adapt quickly. We haven’t been rigorously trained in the regular methods of fighting. We make our own rules. Sometimes it looks like we’re rather bumbling, but that’s the thing, we go in loose and adapt to whatever jumps out at us from the closet.
“So basically, they are good for real life threats, but the Regulators are good for supernatural threats that don’t follow the normal routines of man?”
There ya go.
“Okay, I’m very anxious to find out what happened after Scalp Hunter and Snake Charmer were extracted from the rooftop.”
Immediately after the helicopter took off, I radioed to Dudley. I wanted to see how things were going for him.
“And how were things going?”
Excellent, those guys had managed to pull off one extraction after another. Plus, they had collected their own supply of wooden bullets courtesy a helicopter drop off arranged by Hardin. It was also a relief to hear that they hadn’t run into any more booby traps, but I was pretty sure that there were still plenty of traps out there just waiting to be sprung. I told him to be careful and to be ready to back me up if I called him.
“To back you up?”
Yes, I had a feeling things were coming to a close with my vampire stalker. The reason I felt that way was due to the nature of the trap. All the other traps were zombie traps. We touched a doorknob, and zombies came after us. This trap, however, was a vampire trap. The hotel was a nest.
I figured that this trap was more important to her than the others due to the vampire children. Also, I put myself in the mind of a hunter and realized that if I set a trap, I would want to see the results when it was sprung. For all I knew, she may also want to check on the vampires in the nest. They didn’t seem keen on leaving the hotel so somebody must have been bringing them victims.
I was guessing, or maybe I was hoping, I don’t know, but I was guessing or hoping that she would turn up before dawn to see how things had gone down and dawn was only a couple of hours away.
“So what’s next on the agenda?” Nick asked.
“We prepare a little welcome home surprise,” I answered.
Nick followed me back into the hotel and into one of the rooms. I had left a couple of the vampires alive.
“What are you planning?” Nick asked.
“I’m planning on setting my own trap,” I answered.
“They’re just kids. We should put them out of their misery,” Nick said.
“They stopped being kids when my stalker turned them into monsters,” I answered. “My goal is to stop her from doing this to anyone else, but in order to do that I need to get my freaking hands on her.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” I answered. “But I’m out of options, and she has a friend of mine captive. So unless you have a better way of bringing her in, hush up and grab a hold of its legs.”
To give Nick some credit, he actually stopped grumbling and picked up the vampire’s legs. We carried the paralyzed vampire to the roof and went back to get the next one. Once we had both vampires on the roof, I wrapped their feet up with some rope out of my backpack and tossed them off the edge.
They fell about ten feet on each side of the building; the trap was set.
“Can you explain the details of the trap for me?”
Sure, I took the two remaining paralyzed vampires and hung them off two different sides of the roof. Across the streets of each side of a hanging vampire were tall buildings of the type my stalker seems to prefer since she travels by rooftop.
My hope was that she’d swing by before dawn in order to see what had happened with her booby-trap. When she approached the building, she would see one of the paralyzed vampires. If she circled the building, she’d see both of them.
After that, she’d have to make a choice. She could rescue the vampires or she could let them burn in the sun.
“Wouldn’t she know it was a trap?”
Yeah, it was a pretty obvious trap, but if she wanted to save those vampires from burning in the sun, she’d need to do something anyway.
All Nick and I had to do was wait.
“Were you certain that sunlight would kill them?”
Yeah, my stalker never bothered me during the daytime. Also, Hardin said earlier that sunlight would take them out.
So that was that. We just hunkered down beneath the lip of the roof and waited to see if she’d show. It was shortly before dawn when she finally made her appearance. Nick noticed some movement on the side he was watching.
“Jax,” he said. “I think I saw something.”
“What do you think you saw?” I asked.
“I saw movement on the building across the street,” he answered.
I rapidly crawled over to him and looked over the lip of the roof.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Just keep watching,” he answered.
After what felt like a long time later, I finally saw her. She was in between what looked like brick support columns about midway up the building across the street. She had also changed her clothes. For some reason, she was wearing a white tutu and unitard. It was an odd choice of clothes to be sure, but I doubt vampires are very much in touch with fashion.
She was pretty much level with the vampire we had dangling off of our roof, and she was making a bunch of odd clicking sounds in its direction. I could see the black drool dripping off of her chin.
I removed my tomahawk from my belt.
Nick readied his mp7.
All she had to do was get close enough for me
to pounce on her.
I expected her to jump to our roof, but instead she crawled up to the top of her own building and crouched on the edge. We watched as she paced back and forth. Suddenly, she jumped to a neighboring building and then proceeded to hop from building to building until she had made a complete circle around the hotel.
We waited patiently and merely watched.
She knew it was a trap. That much was obvious when she slammed her fist down on the edge of the roof and sent pieces of brick down onto the street below. She was frustrated, but she wasn’t taking the bait. She didn’t want to walk into danger.
We waited silently.
She began to pace back and forth once again. She examined our rooftop from every conceivable angle, but she never once saw us because we had moved away from the lip and ducked low under a billboard sign.
Dawn was less than an hour away.
She finally made her move.
The leap carried her from her building across the street all the way to the top of our building. If she would have stopped to sniff for us, she would have found us easily. However, she seemed to be extremely nervous and instead of checking her surroundings she immediately went to the rope and began to pull the helpless vampire back onto the rooftop.
We made our move.
Nick unloaded on her, and just as she turned to face her attacker, I buried my tomahawk deep into her chest. She reacted violently, grabbed the collar of my vest and slammed my head onto the edge of the rooftop before dropping the rope holding the immobilized vampire and rushing towards Nick.
It took me just a moment to clear the cobwebs from my head and shake the stars out of my vision. I unloaded a blast from my mp7 right before she could get her hands on him. She arched her back in pain and spun once again in my direction.
My tomahawk was still embedded in her chest. She grabbed the handle, wrenched it free, and threw it back at me. Much to her surprise, I caught the weapon by the wooden handle and threw it right back at her.
The blade of the tomahawk embedded itself into the side of her collarbone and slashed open her carotid artery. The black blood began to gush forth, and she screamed so loud I had to cover my ears.
When she finally stopped, I noticed to my dismay that her jaw had elongated and filled with fangs. She was laughing at me as she pulled the weapon out of her collarbone and held it in her hand. I drilled her with another fully auto blast from my machine gun. The impact spun her in circles, and Nick connected a solid crunching blow to her spine with his fireman’s axe.
I had no doubt that we owed our success to the wooden bullets. They weren’t bringing her down, but she was definitely getting weaker.
The bullet holes were not healing and black blood was leaking freely from the wounds. Her neck was still gushing, and she was trying to staunch the flow of blood with her hand as she ran away from us to the edge of the roof and hesitated.
She looked as if she was worried about making the jump in her injured state.
“Bastard,” she said in a low voice as she turned to face me.
I shot her again.
She ran towards me, and Nick immediately started shooting her in the back, but she wasn’t stopping. When she was close enough, she swung my own weapon at me, but I managed to duck under the blade and slash out with my folding knife. She was getting slower; my blade was able to sever the connective tissue of her left arm and she dropped my weapon as she ran past me towards the metal door of the building.
She was still scary fast.
The metal door slammed shut behind her with an extremely low bang.
“Are you hurt?” I asked Nick.
“She never touched me,” he answered. “How’s your head?”
“Hurts like a bitch,” I answered.
“It’s no wonder,” Nick said. “You’re bleeding pretty badly, probably ruined your cap.”
“I’ll worry about it later,” I said as I rushed towards the metal door.
She had jammed it into the frame, and we wasted precious moments figuring out how to get through. In the end, Nick’s fireman’s axe was able to get in between the door and the frame and pry it open. I made a mental note to stop picking on his lame weapon.
The bodies in the hallway had been disturbed.
“I think we’re in trouble,” I whispered to Nick.
“Fuck that,” he answered. “We’ve got this bitch on the run. Let’s go finish this shit.”
“Get behind me,” I ordered.
Fortunately, Nick actually listened. It was then that I heard the laughter. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It seemed to be echoing around the entire floor.
Nick and I both froze in the hallway.
The situation was bad. I didn’t want to get stuck in an empty hotel with a bloodthirsty vampire without an avenue of escape. The situation would have been so much better out on the street where we could get away from her if things went bad. I had the distinct feeling that I was a fly walking right into a spider’s web.
“I don’t get it,” Nick said. “Despite her wounds, she was still a bad ass. Why’s she hiding?”
I didn’t answer. Nick talks a lot when he’s nervous. It’s best to just ignore him, because nothing else really makes him shut up.
I heard a noise coming from one of the rooms, and I rushed forward with my mp7 in a ready position. I kicked open the door to find my suspicions confirmed. The vampire was feeding off of the corpses of all the vampire children we had killed.
She had used their blood to jumpstart her healing.
As soon as I broke down the door, she stopped her feeding and hurled the corpse at me. I ducked out of the way, but Nick wasn’t so lucky. The impact took him off his feet. I unloaded an entire magazine on the vampire as she streaked around the room in an attempt to avoid taking too much damage.
She was screaming so loud that I wanted to cover my ears, but I couldn’t ease up for even a moment, or I ran the risk of her healing up completely. The cut to her carotid artery had already closed over, but her skin was a sickly pale color, and that’s saying a lot because she was already grayish to begin with. There were even dark circles under her eyes causing her face to have an almost hollow appearance. She definitely wasn’t in top shape, but she was still very dangerous.
In less than a second she had grabbed a hold of me once again. This time I was ready for her and as soon as she was close enough, I flashed out my folding knife and once again opened up her neck. She reacted violently and threw me across the room into Nick who was just getting to his feet.
The black blood was spraying everywhere as she raced past us towards the stairs.
We collected ourselves as quickly as we could and followed after her. The only problem was that in addition to my head wound, I now had a pronounced limp that was slowing me down considerably. I tore something in my knee when I was slammed into Nick, and the stabbing pain traveling up my thigh told me it was probably serious.
I just didn’t have time to heal myself. If I took the time, we’d lose her. If we lost her, she would heal herself completely and come back for us at a different time. It was now or never. I took the stairs two at a time, just trying to close the distance.
It wasn’t until the final flight of stairs that my knee gave out entirely and I tumbled the rest of the way to the landing. I came up on my good leg immediately and wiped the blood away from my eyes with my free hand.
Nick was staring at me in amazement.
I tried to take another step, but I only fell down again.
Things were looking bleak. I had lost the vampire. I had no idea where to look for her outside of the building.
Nick was trying to help me back up and restrain me at the same time when Dudley radioed in.
“Jaxon, you there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I’m here.”
“Are you still hunting after that vampire chick?”
“No,” I answered. “I blew it. We had her wounded, and I screwed up and lost her.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Dudley. “I think I just found her lair.”
“It’s her nest, asshole,” Nick said after clicking his earpiece.
“What?” Dudley asked.
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “Give me directions.”
Dudley was on a street called Baltimore. It was pretty close to UTEP: that’s University of Texas at El Paso. I’m sure I mentioned it before, but it’s the local college. I actually graduated from there.
“How did Dudley find the nest?”
Well, they were seriously kicking ass on the extractions. They had pretty much cleared out the remaining survivors while we were busy fighting vampires. The calls for help had gotten pretty much non-existent, and for lack of anything better to do while they waited for Hardin to find another survivor they were just sort of heading down Mesa in order to shorten the distance between us in case I needed that backup.
As they neared UTEP, Hardin finally found more survivors. Luckily enough, the team was pretty close to their location and they went immediately. The house was pretty old, but it was well maintained. A lot of the area by Baltimore is part of the historic district.
Anyway, Dudley and company went inside and searched the darkened house, but they didn’t find anything, not until Javie walked into the dining room and almost fell through the floor when he stepped on a rug.
They moved the rug out of the way and saw that a hole had been dug about ten feet into the ground. In this hole were seven survivors that had been chained to the wall, four women and three men. The vampire had been feeding on them. There were also about five corpses that she had drained completely. The corpses were still chained to the wall.
From my understanding, one of the remaining survivors wormed her hand free, and started going through the pockets of the corpses next to her. She was lucky enough to find a cell phone that had internet access and sent out a call for help.
Georgie was trying to break the chains as Dudley was telling me the story. I ordered Georgie to stop trying to free the survivors.
“Why?” Dudley asked.
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