Forced Compliance (The Galactic Outlaws Book 1)

by Bradford Bates

  I had the feeling once they found out more about me, the shorter my potential for a long life would be. If they knew about what I could really do, they would think I had too much power and they would end me. They were right, I had more power than any one person had a right too, but that switch in my head leveled out the playing field. My luck on keeping them in the dark had held out, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  Just who was left in here with me? I hoped it was someone a little younger, and a little easier to kill. Most of the older model vamps had been retired, another thing that didn’t bode well for my continued existence. Retired was the word the doctors used when they flipped the switch in your head and dumped your body in the incinerator. As if any of us thought vampires actually got to retire. Like there was a planet out in the Gamma System that offered sanctuary to aging and increasingly useless vamps. I wished they would just say it like it was. If our tech was too outdated, or we were to willful, they killed us.

  I couldn’t think about that now, I was too close to getting out of this damn place to make a mistake. This was going to be it, my shot to see the outside world again. How much could it have changed in fifty years? I wanted to see it, to be able to feel the wind against my skin, to taste the rain on my tongue.

  Failure was not an option, I wanted to live.

  The single thought drove me forward with a certain amount of confidence. Not only did I want to live, but I knew that I was going to. This was my chance to be a part of everything I had been missing. I wanted it so desperately that I didn’t care who I had to kill to get out of here.

  Walking out into a large open room my eyes locked onto the form of the last vampire in my way. Her body was small. My heart clenched twice in rapid succession, and I swayed momentarily. It couldn’t be. They wouldn’t have. Even the doctors wouldn’t be so cruel.

  She turned around and started to speak. “It’s good to see you again, Samantha.”

  The smile that ticked up on one corner of her mouth said it all. She was confident, and why wouldn’t she be. Kristina had all of the newest tech they could cram into a body. She came out of the surgeries as strong as I was now. Sure I was still getting stronger but if she gained strength at the same rate that I did she would always have a leg up on me.

  Shit, I had felt so bad for her when they brought her in. A thirteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be experimented on. But the doctors, they needed their weapons in all shapes and sizes, so this was just par for the course. I had held her while she cried after the surgeries, and now they were going to force me to kill her.

  Everything went black for a moment. I couldn’t do this. There was no way that I would be able to hurt her. Not like that. What was the solution then? That we both died? If that was the case, I might as well just let her kill me.

  My knees buckled, and I dropped to the floor. Why did it have to be her? Why did I have to die so she could live? It wasn’t fair, but neither was the last fifty years of my life.

  “Just make it quick, Kristina.” She started to circle around me.

  “You see that is exactly what I told the doctors, that you would never hurt me. I told them it was pointless to send me in here against you, but they didn’t believe me.” She stopped behind me. “I guess I should be thanking them for making this last test so easy for me.”

  As her hands pressed against the sides of my head her words sunk in. Easy for her, fuck that! This should have been anything but easy. She was about to kill me, and she didn’t feel a damn thing. I was on my knees filled with grief, willing to give myself up so she could live, and she couldn’t care less.

  “Fuck you,” I mumbled as I brought my hands up inside of her forearms. I propelled myself to my feet even as I broke the lock she had on the sides of my head. “How can this be so easy for you?” I shouted into her stunned face as I turned around.

  “Come on, Samantha. You didn’t actually expect me to want to stay in this place forever. Not all of us our content to die in this cement box.”

  I wasn’t fucking content to die in the labs either. That’s why I had fought so hard to stay alive. “I want to live.”

  “We both know that’s not possible.”

  She blurred towards me, and it was all I could do to deflect her attacks. She wasn’t that much stronger than me, but she was faster. A few of her punches broke through my guard. The impact didn’t cause too much damage, but I wouldn’t be able to take those punches forever. Kristina continued to throw everything she had at me, and I did my best to stay on my feet. It didn’t seem like there was anything I could do to get a strike in. Despite all of my efforts, I couldn’t create any separation. I had yet to land anything more than a glancing blow to the girl in front of me.

  I’d never thought to try my mental abilities on another vamp. Their attempts to control me always failed, so I had assumed that was a universal trait. There wasn’t anything else for me to try, and if she kept up her current pace, I’d be dead long before the cleansing fire swept into the warehouse.

  I met her eyes and focused on them while she continued to rain blows down against my forearms. The bones were starting to bruise, but they would hold up long enough. Well, they would if this actually worked. I pushed my will against hers and hoped that I could break her.

  It didn’t crack, at least not at first. Her fists slammed into me again and again. Her knee slammed into my thigh, and I almost lost concentration. As I fell to the ground, the first crack in her armor appeared. She reared back aiming for my head with a kick and just before it landed, her body froze. I was in, I had complete control over her.

  “Get on your knees,” I growled.

  Kristina dropped to her knees. I moved forward and pulled her hair away from her neck. I’d never fed off of another of my kind before, but tonight had been full of surprises. Pushing myself further into her mind let me give her commands telepathically. Her neck tilted to the side making it easier for me to feed. My fangs dropped down, and I plunged them into her neck.

  “Auntie Samantha, please don’t,” she murmured.

  It was enough to snap my concentration but not my will to go through with it. The tiny vampire under me started to writhe and buck against me. I wrapped my arms and legs tightly around her and held on for dear life. Somehow amidst all of the chaos, I was able to continue to feed. Her memories started to wash over me, and I blocked them. I wanted to remember her as the girl that cried in my arms and missed her family. Not as someone that was willing to kill me to get what she wanted.

  Her body stopped fighting, and her heart trickled to almost a stop. I pulled back looking down at the girl that I had cuddled and supported for the final time. I held her out at arm’s length, there was still enough of her left that she met my eyes and managed a smile. I think she started to mouth “it’s ok.” But I missed the end of the words she was forming as I wrenched her head to side. Her neck snapped and then I made sure there was no coming back for her.

  A door in the wall behind me opened, and light flooded into the room. I let her body drop and tried to crush the guilt that I was feeling. I wanted to be happy. I’d won the battle, and now my life was going to change forever. It had better be fucking worth it.

  Success didn’t have to feel great, it only had to be obtained. I was alive, and soon I would be set free into the world once again.

  Chapter 21

  Samantha Ripley

  For the last three months, I’d been out in the open operating alone. It was slightly better than when they had the dogs following me but not much. For each mission, I was given a set amount of time out in the world to complete my task. If I didn’t return to my apartment in time, I was shocked. If I didn’t return at all, they would shock me until I was picked up for retirement. The missions didn’t leave any time for distractions. The only plus side was it quickly taught me how to curb my appetite around regular humans. Fear of death made it real easy not to stop for a snack.

  Before I had been put in place outside of the labs, anytime I was all
owed outside had felt like a blessing. Just like a drop of water was worth any amount of gold in the desert, any time out of the lab was priceless to me. Two weeks ago I had started my life living outside of the lab. The downside was the building was infested with the beasts. The upside was I was out of the lab permanently. That didn’t mean I was free, they could hit a button sending me to my knees whenever they felt like it, but it hadn’t happened yet. So I had been slowly testing the boundaries of my new role.

  None of that mattered tonight. Tonight I was breaking the rules, and doing something for myself. Tonight I got to hunt. I had a feeling the scientists knew about my little trips out into the world, but they hadn’t stopped me yet. Maybe it was because of my choice in targets, or maybe it was that not a single shred of evidence had been left behind for the authorities to find. It didn’t matter to me why they let me do it, only that I could, and that when I hunted, I felt like myself again.

  Tonight’s target was Kim Sanchez. He was a low down dirty pimp with heavy ties into the drug scene. He didn’t care who he hurt as long as he got paid. I’d been stalking him for weeks and had personally seen him kill two people and beat at least four others into unconsciousness. His men had done worse, and I haven’t even told you about the girls he worked yet. Killing him probably wouldn’t disrupt his operation for long, but it was a start.

  It was Friday, that meant Kim would go to one of his buildings reserved for breaking in the new girls. After he had satiated his darker needs, he would go out for dinner. Dinner would have been an ideal place to murder him, but there were just too many damn witnesses. That only left me with the option of attacking him at his heavily fortified flop house or not at all. There was going to be collateral damage, but none of these men would be truly missed.

  So far I’d only taken out isolated targets on my little hunting trips, and I knew I’d be pushing the limits of whatever boundaries the scientists were letting me operate under. It was worth it to end a vile man like Sanchez.

  I took to the roofs of the city and headed towards my target. Sprinting towards the edge of the roof I jumped out into open space. The next building was a hundred stories below me. There was extra fabric built into the arms of my jacket almost making it like a flight suit. I wondered how much easier this would have been a thousand years ago when the buildings were smaller. Easier but nowhere near as fun.

  Coasting through the air was exhilarating. It always left my heart pumping just a bit harder. What could I say, I was a bit of an adrenaline junkie. It was the same kind of thrill I got from the hunt, just on a smaller scale. It felt good to be the one making the decisions instead of just taking orders. Most people took this kind of freedom for granted. Not me, I relished the brief glimpses of freedom that I was given.

  Changing the angle of my descent was pretty easy. I’m not sure a human body could have handled the strain, but I’d never know for sure. It was hard for me to remember when I was that fragile. It seemed so long ago. Part of me cried out, wanting me to cling to everything that I had wanted to be when I was human, and another part tried to violently rip those memories from my mind. Why try and remember what it was like to be weak? I was strong, I was a hunter. Kim Sanchez was about to finally find out what it felt like to be the victim.

  The twenty-story building I landed on was a relic from the past. It probably would have been torn down if Kim didn’t run one of his more lucrative businesses out of it. The first five floors were filled with people too poor to afford better office space. The next ten floors were empty, and the remaining five were filled with girls, beds, drugs, and if rumors were true a few boys as well.

  This was where they took them when they came in fresh off the ships. Here they got you addicted, and then they broke you until there was nothing left. I’d watched as a girl who fought slowly succumbed to the punishment, and now she almost seemed a willing participant. This was physiological and pharmaceutical warfare. No one could be expected to hold up under that kind of duress. It was time for the horrors being committed there to stop.

  The roof seemed quiet, but I knew there were at least two men stationed there. I’d have to take them out, but once I did I had to move quickly. The men checked in on a closed comm system every five minutes. That wasn’t a lot of time to search five floors hoping to get lucky. If he was anywhere but the top of this building, I might not have time to find him before his guards swarmed me. I was good, but I wasn’t seventy-five men with guns good. At least not yet.

  Moving around the roof, I found the two guards. They were stationed to either side of a doorway. I kept the ten-foot tall structure between the guards and myself as I moved forward. I needed to get close enough to hear them check in, once they did, the race to finding Kim before they found me was on. I leaped the ten feet onto the top of the exit. Inching forward, I positioned myself to attack.

  “This is Charlie one, all clear.”

  “Charlie two, all clear.”

  Dropping between the men, I grabbed their heads and slammed them together. The damn things burst like overripe melons, and I was sprayed from head to toe in the gore. So much for being subtle once I got inside. I found it hard to believe that my head had ever been that weak. The blow I had dealt them would have only momentarily stunned one of my kind. I was going to have to remember to go easier next time. This couldn’t look like anything besides gang on gang violence.

  There wasn’t time to waste lamenting the deaths of the wicked. Inside of this building, hundreds of people were dying their own kind of death, one that started slow but would end fast and brutal. The men on the roofs had guns, not a lot of extra ammo, but the guns themselves were a plus. Two rifles and two pistols, only the handguns had spare clips. I tucked the handguns into the waistband of my pants. One rifle went over my back and the other I kept at the ready.

  The steel door wouldn’t open when I pulled the latch, so I slammed a hand into the steel next to the lock. I felt the bones in my hand bend under the force of the blow, but the door bent just a little. Screw it, I was just going to have to hope no one was in the stairwell to hear this. My foot slammed into the door breaking off one of the hinges. Having super strength was a definitely plus. I looked down at the two corpses by my feet. Most of the time.

  I took the stairs three at a time until I turned the corner only to find two more guards waiting. Could I risk the gunfire, or was it too early for that? The moment of indecision cost me as the two guards opened fire. Ducking back around the corner, I checked the rifle to make sure it was ready. The noise wasn’t going to be a problem anymore.

  “Ok, I surrender. Don’t shoot.” They must have bought it because the bullets stopped firing. I was still a little surprised that they had started shooting right away. That was until I looked down at myself and was reminded of the melon twins upstairs. I must have looked like a zombie from one of the horror vids. It probably wasn’t a bad life philosophy just to shoot anyone that is running at you covered in blood.

  I made sure to keep my hands in front of me as I stepped around the corner. I poked my head out, and the men both had wide terrified eyes, but they didn’t shoot. That was their mistake. I called on my vampire energy and started to move. It would have only looked like a blur to them, but for me, I got to watch their faces change from scared to surprised and then plasma from my rifle tore through their bodies.

  Before they had even hit the floor, I was through the door and into Sanchez’s territory. The hallway just looked like every other cheap office building I had ever seen. It was white from the floor to the ceiling, with doors opening off both sides of the corridor. There wasn’t a method to the madness, so I just opened doors and killed anyone that looked like they were having a good time. By the time I reached the end of the corridor, one of the rifles was empty and the other’s energy cell was only half full.

  Three more doors to go and then I had to hope I had time left to try a different floor. I already felt like my window for success was closing. If Kim got away from me tonight, there
was every possibility that I wouldn’t be able to come back for a second opportunity to end the filthy bastard. I had to find a way to kill him tonight. I also needed to get back to the roof and make sure those bodies didn’t look like someone slammed two heads together hard enough to make them explode. Not sure how that would play out in the media, but there was no way that kind of extra attention would be good for me.

  The next two rooms were duds. Just more Johns ruining the lives of these victims. It was one thing to choose to have sex for money and quite another to be forced into doing it. I was kind of a big fan of letting people make their own damn decisions even if I didn’t agree with them. Fuck the people that wanted to judge you. That’s probably why I spent fifty years inside of the lab. None of the scientists really liked the fact that I still thought for myself, and didn’t blindly follow orders like the others. Acting that way was a risky proposition at best, a dangerous one at worst.

  One door left. The fucker had better be in there, or I just wasted my Friday night. No girl likes to do that. Trust me boys, if it’s Friday night and she says she is washing her hair, or worse just watching vids, it means she doesn’t want to go out with you, ever. It’s better just to realize that it’s never going to happen and move on instead of making yourself look like an ass. Sure some of them might give in eventually, but you had to know things were never really going to work out.

  I didn’t bother with subtle this time, I just kicked open the door and started to fire at anything that moved. Two guards went down, and my heart started to beat faster. There wouldn’t be multiple guards in just any room. The two by the inner door went down next, and I tossed the empty rifle to the side. None of the men I had just killed had anything better than the handguns I was already carrying. So I moved towards the back of the room.