by Rena Marks
“Worried?” I called out, without making eye contact.
His overhead chuckle was pretentious. “Vanity! You were the best of the Extinguishers, that’s true enough. But we have at least a dozen and a half now, with another two dozen in training. Not to mention the human guardage. Do you really think to take all that on?”
So the bastard needed a demo. Fine with me. Apparently he didn’t know about the human guardage I’d already taken down.
Up ahead was the training room, a room in which every spare moment of our downtime was utilized. While humans took breaks in a coffee room, Extinguishers took breaks in the training room, where we worked. The room was never unoccupied. More importantly, beyond the room was the office of the assistant, Dr. Trubachev. All branches of my secrets had to be exterminated.
“They are aware you’re coming, Afton. They can hear the intercom system in there.”
“I remember,” I said dryly and kicked open the double doors.
They were already positioned in a fighting stance but it didn’t matter. Quickly, I registered a quick assessment of the room.
There were only eight.
I tried not to look surprised at the youth of the faces. Yet in spite of the immaturity, there was a hardness there. They were machines, deprived of emotion. Just like I had once been.
Before Ethan.
And they had trained well. None attacked first. If I also refused to move, we’d be at a standstill.
Yet, I’d always succeeded because I thought for myself. Right now, I didn’t have time to mess around. I had to find my vampire.
I jumped vertically—straight up, all the way to the ceiling. The fastest of the trainees was able to track my speed, tilting his head back as he watched me grab onto the light fixture. He had an advantage over the rest of the men, so he would be the first I’d take out.
His tilted head was exactly the position I needed, his being the nearest face to me. I kicked before his instinct told him to turn away. The cartilage in his nose shot directly into his brain behind the force of my steel-toed boot. His eyes didn’t even roll back into his head before he died.
The trainee next to him lost the next precious second in shock over the instantaneous death next to him. Apparently the trainees had not been taught the important lesson of not depending or trusting a colleague.
Never trust a brother who had been stricken and trained with you, like a clone of yourself. They would be the first to turn on you.
Maybe that was a lesson plan the Academy of Extinguishers did away with. Foolish how they’d always tried to re-create my success by fixing areas they assumed were broken. One day, they might catch on to whatever had been done to me worked beyond their wildest dreams. That day, they would set up their trainees with a traitor in their midst to teach them the lesson from hell.
But not for this bunch of kids. This bunch was done for. The second-in-training realized it just before the stiletto of my boot pierced his eyeball at an angle deep enough to puncture the cerebellum between his sockets, lobotomizing him instantly. But he was lucky, he still could live.
Two down, six left. Six was easy enough for me to handle, I’d done it routinely. And now they were just as ready, having witnessed the full attack of two of their own.
I dropped from the fixture into the center of the room, ducking when one struck a kick. A natural-born sixth sense, had me kicking out behind me, at the same time I bent from the waist, pleased when my foot connected. I grabbed the raised kicking leg in front of me and pulled it toward me to block the punch from another.
The leg cracked from the force. Before I dropped it, I kicked his standing leg. The knee shattered and I tuned out his screams. Worthless to me now, I tossed my human shield aside.
Immediately, I dropped and rolled. Two of the men locked their arms for a fighting stance, more power together. I grabbed a gun from my belt and Tasered the two of them. They should have known that was one of the drawbacks of fighting with a partner. It was why we were taught the skill, but hardly ever used it. It had some uses but should one be harmed, you were simultaneously taken down.
My Taser was set to kill, the electric beam high enough to boil your blood. Not a pretty sight, for the steam had to erupt from stressed areas of the body.
Eyes, ears, mouth.
The smell was gagging also, since the stench of inwardly cooked parts was evident. I quickly switched the trigger on the gun from Taser to bullet, giving the last three old-fashioned shots to the abdomen. It would mean slow deaths, for there was small blood loss in the GI. The bullet was less likely to bounce around and cause damage, since the gut absorbs forward energy.
All men were down, with considerable groaning from those still alive. I turned on my heel and continued my purposeful stride down a smaller, narrower hallway.
But a small noise from behind me caught my attention. A door was closed, presumably locked. I remembered the small room, no bigger than a closet, in which a giant window allowed the person inside to watch the Extinguishers train.
I turned the doorknob, and for once a room was not locked. A white-faced guard stood, his hand on the head of a tiny little girl, no more than three or four.
Her hair was blonde but shorn close to her head. Her eyes stared, huge and brown. She was unusually small and stood with her thumb plugged into her mouth.
My stomach roiled. She’d witnessed the carnage through the one-way window.
“A child?” I spat.
“An experiment,” he answered. He was young too, his voice not yet fully mature. “One almost as young as you were.”
They had tried to re-create the theory that a younger child would make a better Extinguisher. Obviously a stolen child, for the legal age was eight.
“What is her name?”
“N-338.”
“I’ll let you live today,” I snapped to the guard. “On one condition. Get her upground. Go through the west wing, the cameras lie. The guards will be kept busy.”
I turned on my heel.
The voice over the loudspeaker picked up as soon as the cameras had me in their view.
“What did you do to the cameras in the rooms, Afton?”
“Set them all to play as opposed to record. You’ve been watching old videos in every room except for the hallway you see me in now.”
I had meant it when I said the cameras lie.
“Untrue! You couldn’t have killed eight men in the span of ten minutes.”
“My speed has improved,” I said in my mildest tone.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do you see any of them chasing me?”
I knew by the pause that he thought about it. But it was too late, for I arrived at the next room.
The door crashed open with a kick, the electrical current fizzing and popping but never touching me with the help of the rubberized Extinguisher boots.
Dr. Trubachev stood in the middle of the room, a gun in hand, aimed at the door. His pea-sized head sat incongruously on his overweight body, with sparse, coarse hairs sprouting over the egg-shaped skull. His bottom lip quivered.
“You and I had a secret between us, did we not?” I asked gently.
“You’ve gone crazy,” he shrieked. “You’re a demented monster! Like one of them!”
He shot wildly but I was ready for it. Before the gun even went off, I morphed to a spot where I’d stood long ago as a child. On a scale where he would weigh me daily.
From the scale, I calmly reached for the hand that held the gun and turned it toward his temple.
It was so quick, his human brain couldn’t track the time difference before he squeezed the trigger again. In slow motion, I appreciated his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down once before blowing his brains and spattering the wall behind him with the thick, gelatinous goo.
I wouldn’t need the gun. With a push, I shoved his headless body backward and again walked through the door.
I was barely aware of the screaming over the loudspeaker.
&
nbsp; “Trubachev. To headquarters! Trubachev!”
Dr. Fokusovich wasn’t thinking. He left the intercom on, so even if Trubachev was able to call, he couldn’t get through. I could hear the panic in his high-pitched voice and knew he was about to repeat the page even though barely a second had passed. But he was too late. I had reached the main computer room. Just beyond it was the headquarters belonging to the voice himself.
The doctor I hated most.
Dr. Fokusovich.
Chapter Sixteen
I entered the main computer room just as the overhead viewing monitors were switched back to record, giving the first show of what had recently transpired in the training room. On the oversized screens, five bodies lay completely still. Three writhed in agony.
I tore my eyes away. Along the walls of the room, guards lined the way. Guns were drawn, pointing directly at me.
“I will kill any and all who tangle with me,” I said in my most mild voice.
“Drop your weapons,” ordered the commander’s voice. The human guards showed quick surprise, losing eye contact to glance at him. I wasn’t surprised at his command, I knew I was too valuable to waste without testing. And I was useless to them dead. For all Dr. Fokusovich’s false claims, my blood could never be reanimated, not even when mixed with vampiric blood.
He was an egotistical bastard, his greed over wanting so desperately to dissect me winning out over the danger of keeping me alive. It was the last mistake he’d ever make.
Slowly, the guns were all put away and I walked directly ahead to the door that led to Fokusovich’s office. I put all my anger into the kick, which took very little effort. The door broke away from the doorjamb with a crash, leaving an even bigger hole.
He stood unprotected, ready to face the music.
I’m not sure what I expected but this wasn’t it.
Now he was bent over, years of hunching taking their toll. His head looked even more misshapen with years of balding. What hair he did have was soft and fine, like the downy fur of a baby chick. He was more pathetic than evil.
Where was my fear now? The doctor was a man, just a man. Old now, still evil but not strong and big like my memories when I was a child.
The Dr. Frankenstein I remembered.
To a child, he’d been huge and heavy, larger than life and hideously deformed, a monster with an evil streak, just as ugly inside as he was out.
But he had my Ethan.
“Where is he?” I hissed, moving quickly across the room so the sharp tip of my knife blade pressed directly under his chin. An inner war raged within me, I could hardly fight against the temptation to slice through his flimsy flesh, much like I’d watched the throat ripped from his colleague so many years ago by the fangs of…my father.
“Do it,” he demanded, his voice ever the nasally whine, even worse in person than over the loudspeaker. “You’ll never find the vampire if I’m dead.”
“Bastard.”
I felt the vibration around me signifying the entry morph of an Extinguisher. The idiots never had any idea I could sense much quicker than anyone else ever would. After all, they didn’t realize my morphing was enhanced with being part vampire.
It was not well-planned idea. An Original, morphing in to save the day and the good doctor. My smile for Fokusovich was deadly when I pulled the silver boomerang from my thigh-strap and aimed for the area where the Extinguisher’s head would be in just a few more seconds.
“Noo!” the doctor screamed too late.
The Extinguisher dusted before he even finished materializing.
I raised my hand to catch the return of my boomerang and returned it to the strap on my leg.
“Order the rest away, or you’ll watch them all die before I slit your throat,” I snarled.
“Bitch. You’d kill your own kind?”
“With relish. I have no loyalty to those who’ve hunted me.”
“They follow orders. The same way you did.”
“If they can’t think for themselves, they deserve to die.”
“My God. What have we created?”
“Are you kidding me? You deprived human children of emotion, poisoned us with the virus of vampirism, tortured and experimented on us, and then ask what you’ve created?”
“I made you stronger than anyone in the world. Cutting you off from useless emotions, strengthened you. You have no weaknesses for others to use against you. The moment you grew weak, like with the vampire, it pulled you down. Don’t you see that? It’s the only way we got you to return.”
“So you’ll exterminate my…weakness, did you call him?”
“It’s for the best, Afton.”
“Then, Doctor Frankenstein, perhaps I should exterminate all of your weaknesses. Every Extinguisher you ever trained. Every human guard in this facility. Every record, every file, every piece of this puzzle that gives you pleasure. That is your humanity.”
He truly looked astounded. “You can’t do that! This is government property.”
“This is weakness, Doctor. Remember?”
“I see what you’re trying to do but you’ll never get him.”
“How about if we trade information? The whereabouts of my vampire, for…the greatest secret you ever wanted.”
I let the silence fill the room. His face was interested, almost excited. We both knew what I spoke of. I lowered my pitch to an almost-whisper. “Do you still wonder why, Dr. Fokusovich?”
He stood unmoving, as if even his breathing might distract me. He understood exactly what I spoke of. What was the catalyst?
“Commander,” he called out. “Please excuse all the guardage waiting until further instruction.”
“Yes, sir.”
We waited a few moments until there was dead silence beyond the room from us. Only then, I voiced what he had wanted to hear. “What worked so well with me? Why could you never re-create me? I was your biggest success and your biggest failure. I was pure blind luck.”
He nodded carefully, not wanting to appear too eager.
“Watch this,” I whispered. Then I ran all across the room, so fast it defied gravity as he knew it. I challenged myself, balancing halfway up on the walls and ended standing directly behind him.
To whisper into his deformed ear.
“I never morphed.”
Without touching him, I could feel the vibrations of his heart thumping in his chest. It echoed in my ears, ba-boom. Ba-boom.
Fear.
His voice was incredulous. “That was running?”
“See?” I breathed. “I had skills I hid from you. More than the other Extinguishers. Hidden talents that developed, sometimes overnight.”
“H-How?” Although I couldn’t see his jaw move, the back of his flat skull did. As if it was one piece, from the top of his head to the base of his neck.
“A combination of things. My mother was raped by a vampire. Which you knew. I’m the product. I shouldn’t have been born, but I was. I should have died, but I didn’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t have even made it to adulthood, who knows? I was probably meant to be more human but you, Dr. Frankenstein, you chose the only half-breed in the world to infect with the blood of a vampire.
“And not just any vampire. The key was, I was stricken with the virus-infected blood of my…own genetic father. The rapist, Ramon Durant?”
I could almost see the wheels turning in his shrunken head. Forgetting his terror, he whipped around to face me.
“My God! That pathetic creature you killed?”
“Yup.”
“That is exactly the information I need! We need to find out why the vampire’s sperm was compatible with a human egg, then why you weren’t some sort of genetic mutation, an abortion like the rest of the fertilized misbreeds. Why you were more human than vampire, what were the more dominant chromosomes? How did being stricken affect your development and what were the chances that it was your own progenitor’s blood we used?”
“No,” I said calmly. “You see, I killed Dr. Moro
zov so the information wouldn’t be revealed. The vampire didn’t kill him back then, I did. To protect my secret. Now, I want my Ethan,” I reminded gently. And punctuated with the slightest press of the blade against his throat again. Enough to draw a drop of blood. Blood was what the good doctor understood. It was the liquid of life. At the same time, I wondered, was my knife sharp enough to decapitate him?
At last he showed his true colors. He squealed, tripping over his tongue to get the information out fast enough. “I’m so sorry, Afton. We didn’t realize the information you’d be willing to trade for him! He’s drained, his body dumped behind the building at the dumpsters. But I didn’t remove his heart, if it hasn’t been too long, I mean there might be brain damage, like the one we’d captured before, your father but…”
My knife was sharp enough for decapitation.
* * * * *
I saw red. I didn’t even bother cleaning the dripping blade before I raced to the back exit. A mistake that cost me.
I burst through the back door into a corridor that would lead to the outside. There to confront me was a lone Extinguisher. Dead silence reigned as we faced each other. At this point I realized the mistake I made, for I had been tracked with the trail of blood I’d left.
“Where is he?” I demanded, as if I had the upper hand.
“I am as strong as you, but more trained than you. You think to intimidate me? You’re just a little girl.”
Why did they always use my size against me? Was it no longer taught as Extinguisher basics, that speed and agility were our first weapons?
“You are wasting my time,” I said slowly. “If you are not going to give me information, get out of my way.”
He went against all training and struck, hitting me across the jaw and flinging me backward. I jumped to my feet but I was tired. He hit me again and this time I stayed down, flat on my back.
He walked slowly toward me. “You’re under arrest, Afton. For the murder of several government officials on this camp. You have the right to remain silent.” He grinned. “Even after I tell you your vampire is already dead. I watched it myself. We let him bleed out, figuring we could use the body for some purpose later. Maybe tricking you into believing he lived, hooked to tubes and shown to you through a monitor—”