Blue Shadow

by Brad Magnarella

  Someone’s awake! I thought.

  Blown back, the vampire fell to the ground with a thud, the top half of him chewed up and smoking. The two vampires behind him, Rata and Calaca, looked at their teammate and retreated.

  A helmet emerged from the van door. Expecting to see Olaf, I was surprised to find Sarah using her elbows to muscle herself into better firing position. She sighted on Rata and ripped him with a burst from her M4. He shrieked inside a mist of blood and powdered silver. The van’s side door cannoned open. This time it was Olaf, wielding his MP88 like a boss. He wasted no time finding Calaca and blowing his narrow chest open with a burst of incendiary rounds.

  Sensing a shift, the vampire Torpe threw my dead weight over his shoulder and took off running. Whatever his plan, it was the respite I needed. My body began to heal in a warm wave. In another few moments I’d be able to waste him and join my teammates. But as gunfire chattered behind me, I realized the vampire was probably only carrying me far enough away so he could safely teleport. The chilling voice returned.

  Enter me…

  With trees flashing past, I craned my neck around to see where we were going. Up ahead, a narrow black hole was opening in a jungle of dense growth. It pulsed and fluttered like something living. Something evil. I pounded Torpe’s back with my fists. I couldn’t let him reach the hole, couldn’t let him carry me inside. When a nauseating current of energy passed over me, I felt myself falling.

  Too late, I’m going in.

  But I didn’t fall into an endless nothingness like I’d expected. Instead, I slammed into the ground. Torpe was beside me, face down. Feet from the hole, something had hit him.

  The hell?

  I scooted backwards—until a hand seized the scruff of my neck and began dragging me back toward the hole. I recognized Baboso by his smell, but I had more fight in me now. I seized his wrist and bent it back until it snapped. He spun toward me, murder in his blood-speckled eyes. I drove a fist into his chin. His head snapped back and forth like a Jack in the Box, but he held on.

  When another current of nausea passed over me, I recognized its source.

  A coiling black bolt struck Baboso’s chest. With a choked cry, the vampire clown released me and staggered backwards. The next bolt drove him into the hole. Sparks erupted from the collision of magic.

  “It worked, Mr. Wolfe!” Yoofi called.

  The hole shuddered, as though reacting to something bitter, and collapsed in on itself. I turned to find Yoofi running toward me, smoke drifting from the end of his staff. I relocated my jaw for the second time and pushed myself to my feet. The last of the bruising receded from my muscles and bones until all that remained was a general throbbing, but even that was dissipating.

  “I did what you said! I told Dabu that if he run this time, I never give him drink or smokes again. He said ‘Fine.’ But right before the van crashed, he came back and protected me. Then he helped me heal Olaf and Sarah. I think me and Dabu going to have a big fight later, but for now, he’s not running.”

  I worked as Yoofi talked, plunging a stake through Torpe’s chest before the big clown could recover. I then trussed him up with razor wire. I was acutely aware of the gunfire still going off at the crash site. Finishing the job, I lifted Torpe under one of my arms.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. “But we’ve got a fight of our own to get back to.” I went to activate my radio before realizing I didn’t have my earpiece. Probably fell out when I pulled my helmet off in the van.

  Yoofi struggled to keep up as I ran back to the crash site. The shooting had stopped. Sarah and Olaf were no longer there. I peered around. Loco’s shriveled corpse lay off to one side, his head severed. The vampire Rata was dead too. I spotted a scalpel and test tube on the chest of his decapitated body.

  Don’t tell me Sarah was trying to get a tissue sample.

  Sniffing around, I found Olaf on the far side of the van. His throat was torn open and his neck broken, but thanks to the tissue-regeneration treatment, he was still alive—or nonliving. Unresponsive, though. That didn’t bode well for Sarah. The chilling voice had given an execution order.

  Yoofi arrived, panting, at the crash site. I showed him a staying hand as I listened. A noise reached my pricked ears. I pivoted around until I was staring at a thicket. The noise sounded again: a high-pitched suckling, as though someone was trying to drain his victim very quietly.

  I lowered Torpe to the ground and signaled for Yoofi to keep an eye on him. Pulling a stake from my belt, I crept toward the thicket. I could just make out bits of Sarah and the vampire Calaca. His skeletal body was hunched over her, lips pulling greedily from her neck.

  You’re not to feed, the chilling voice said. You’re to kill…

  “Not this time,” I muttered.

  I broke into a bounding run. Calaca’s face whipped toward me, lips smeared red. When his hands moved, I knew he was positioning them to snap Sarah’s neck. Still thirty meters away, I threw the stake like a dagger. It spun end over end at hundreds of miles per hour before implanting in Calaca’s chest, pinning him to the tree at his back. Sarah slumped from his grasp.

  I reached them a second later, talons tearing through the growth. Calaca snarled and wriggled, one hand clutching the end of the stake, the bony fingers of the other stretching toward Sarah’s head.

  Kill her! the voice insisted.

  The stake hadn’t penetrated Calaca’s heart. I could fix that.

  Slamming a forearm into his neck, I jerked the stake free—“Nice knowing you,” I snarled—then plunged it back in, two inches to the left. This time, the stake found its beating mark. Calaca’s eyes shot wide as his body locked into a kind of rigor mortis. I eyed his thin neck. With half the team injured, I couldn’t handle another hostage. A hard slash of my talons removed his head this time. It fell to the forest floor, eyes staring from their black-painted sockets.

  I lifted Sarah and clamped a hand over the ugly gash on her neck. Her eyes were closed, her skin white and waxy. She looked too much like Billy Young had all those years ago. But she still had a pulse. She was breathing. I carried her back to the crash site, where Yoofi remained with a staked and trussed-up Torpe.

  “What happened?” he asked in alarm.

  “Best I can tell, Sarah tried to cut some material off of rat boy over there. A vamp she and Olaf must’ve thought was out of action recovered. He took care of Olaf, then grabbed Sarah and started feeding.”

  I considered how Calaca’s greedy appetite may have saved Sarah’s life.

  “Ooh, does this mean she is a vampire?” Yoofi asked.

  “Only if he gave her some of his blood, and I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen.” I knelt with Sarah, setting her on the forest floor. “She’s drained, though. We need Dabu’s help.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Yoofi knelt beside her. When I moved my hand, he drew his breath in sharply through his teeth. “Ooh, that looks bad. And Dabu doesn’t like blood.”

  There was a lot Dabu didn’t like, I was discovering. “We don’t have much time,” I reminded him.

  Yoofi closed his eyes and began to mutter in a foreign tongue. Within moments, gray smoke coiled around the end of his staff and began spilling onto the wound like liquid. As I watched I considered that while Sarah might not become a vampire, that didn’t rule out a blood slave. We’d learned in her lectures that a slave was created when a vampire drained his or her victim of both blood and psyche. I had stopped Calaca before he could complete the first, and I wasn’t sure he’d even begun the second, but we would need to keep a close eye on her.

  After several minutes, the smoke from the staff guttered out, and Yoofi opened his eyes.

  “Dabu has healed her,” he said.

  This was the first time I’d seen Yoofi attempt a healing. Anxiously, I waved the smoke clear from Sarah’s neck. Dried blood still caked the site, but the gash was closed. I stopped and squinted.

  “Is that scar in the shape of a smiley face?”

 
; Yoofi giggled. “Yes, Dabu make joke. You like?”

  “No,” I growled. “When will she wake up?”

  Yoofi worked hard to straighten his lips. “Dabu stopped the bleeding, but cannot put back the blood.”

  So Sarah was effectively out of commission until she received a transfusion. I blew out a hard breath. I’d have to call Centurion for a medevac. “We’ve got another in need of healing,” I told Yoofi.

  He followed me to where Olaf had fallen. “Dabu says will have to wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Hour? Dabu used much energy to make smiley face.”

  I rounded on him. “He’s fucking kidding, right?”

  “Dabu always kidding, but not about this.”

  I pulled the van down onto four wheels and then went into the back for the medical kit. Inside, I found a neck splint. Returning to Olaf, I straightened his broken spine as best I could, slid the splint in place, and secured his head and neck. We would need to medevac him too. I loaded Olaf and then Sarah into the backseats of the van, where I happened on my MP88. I slung it over a shoulder, then walked to where Torpe’s body lay, still paralyzed.

  I stuffed him in the cargo space in the very back of the van. It was a tight squeeze for the big vampire clown, making me wish I’d grabbed his scrawny partner, Calaca, instead.

  “We going back?” Yoofi asked. “What about the shaman?”

  “We have too many casualties. We have to take them down.”

  “I take them,” Yoofi said. “You find the shaman.”

  “Forget it. I can’t let you go down alone.”

  I did hate leaving when we were so close to our best potential lead, but the clown troupe showing up where it did—practically on Chepe’s doorstep—probably hadn’t been a coincidence. The shaman was involved one way or another. I would have to get our hostage to tell us how.

  I climbed into the front seat of the van. The windshield on the driver side wasn’t smashed to near-opacity like on the passenger, and the body was in good shape. I reset the transmission and gave the key a crank. I was surprised when the engine turned. It coughed and chugged for half a minute before smoothing out.

  “If I push, can you steer her back to the road?” I asked Yoofi, placing the van in neutral and grabbing my helmet. Sure enough, my earpiece was inside. I put them both back on.

  Yoofi nodded and took my place. With him working the wheel, I pushed the van up the steep incline, through the broken swath we’d arrived by, until we were back on the road.

  “Wolf 2, Wolf 1,” I radioed Rusty. “You copy?”

  “Loud and clear. What’s going on, boss man?”

  “I need you to call for a medevac for two.”

  “Holy shit. What happened?”

  “Ambush. One will need blood, and one will need…” What would Olaf need. “Hell, just have them meet us down at the fields.”

  “Copy that.” Rusty said.

  Yoofi moved to the back to watch over our injured as I climbed in and took over driving. I drove fast. I was conscious of our injured passengers as we jounced down the road, but time was short. I focused on the steep road while scouring our surroundings in my peripheral vision. One of the vampires had gotten away, plus there was that chilling voice I’d heard. I had to assume it belonged to the magic-user—someone who could direct vampires and open holes in reality. Not a person I wanted to encounter on the way down.

  Yoofi let out a scream that spiked my hackles.

  “Where?” I called, but when I turned a corner, I saw for myself. One of those pulsing black holes was opening in the road ahead of us. I stomped the brakes. The van caught gravel and began slewing sideways.

  “Come back here!” Yoofi yelled at his god. “Come back, damn you!”

  A figure emerged from the hole and faced us.

  It was our missing teammate, Takara.

  19

  Takara’s hair billowed as she strode toward us, eyes red, smoke rising from her leather-clad body. Like the morning she and I had gone toe to toe, she looked terrifying, almost demonic.

  But she wasn’t my biggest concern right now. The van was heading for a precipice. Grunting, I turned the steering wheel hard into our slide. Inches from the drop, the wheels grabbed ground, and I veered us back onto the gravel road. Speed remained an issue. We were barreling down a steep decline, straight toward Takara and the black hole. I pulsed the brakes.

  Fifty meters ahead, Takara stopped and raised an arm. Heat warped the air around her hand tattoo. I braced for a blast. But in the next moment, Takara’s hand dimmed, and she collapsed into a heap.

  To avoid running her over, I turned hard. One side of the van reared up an embankment before I was past her and able to steer back onto the road. But the black hole was growing, spreading across our path, and we were rushing up on it. I wouldn’t be able to avoid it.

  Remembering the hole’s reaction to Yoofi’s magic, I shouted, “Hit the hole with the Kembo!”

  “Can’t,” Yoofi grunted. “Dabu ran far away this time!”

  I pressed a button that retracted the driver side window, held out my MP88, and fired a burst of grenade rounds. The baseball-sized projectiles punched through the center of the hole and detonated with dim flashes and muted thuds. I didn’t know whether they would be effective—hell, I didn’t even know what I was shooting at—and at first nothing happened. Then the edges of the hole began to shake like a jellyfish, and the whole thing collapsed.

  The van skidded through the space the hole had occupied a second before and came to a crunching stop. Yoofi’s scream tailed off and he peered around. I got out with my weapon and ran back to where Takara had fallen. Though smoke continued to drift from her body, she was cool to the touch. Bits of green jelly clung to her hair. She didn’t respond when I shook and spoke to her, but she was breathing. I lifted her behind her knees and arms and ran with her back to the van.

  “Make room!” I called to Yoofi. “We’ve got another casualty!”

  Centurion’s helos were just landing in the soccer fields when we burst from the woods and onto a dirt road on the outskirts of El Rosario. I bounced the van hard over a small drainage ditch. The rear exhaust gave a harsh cough and a sulfurous odor filled the van as we sped onto the field. Centurion medics were already hustling toward us with plinths. I parked the van, ran around to the side door, and unloaded Sarah, who was still unconscious.

  “She needs blood,” I barked as I handed her off.

  While I went back into the van for Olaf, one of the medics got a needle catheter into Sarah’s arm and hooked up a bag of saline and another of O-negative. When I set Olaf on the plinth beside Sarah’s, his eyes popped open. They rolled around a few times before staring at the sky.

  “What happened to him?” the medic asked.

  “Broken neck and extensive head trauma.”

  “Holy shit. How is he even awake?”

  “He’s on Centurion’s tissue regeneration protocol,” I said. “Be sure to coordinate his care with Biogen. Also, he and Sarah need to be on vampire protocol.” Something else we had learned in her lectures the week before. “Secure rooms and twenty-four hour monitoring.”

  Since our arrival in El Rosario, Sarah had been keeping the support team briefed. The medic swallowed dryly and nodded as he and the others began carrying my teammates toward the helo. Two more medics arrived with a third plinth. “You have one more?” a young woman asked.

  “We do.” I had radioed the info on Takara to Rusty, who had in turn informed the incoming team. But as I ducked into the van, I found Takara sitting up, both hands holding her head.

  Yoofi, who had been helping me unload the casualties, looked from her to me in confusion. “She just get up,” he explained.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked her carefully. “Do you need help getting out?”

  “I don’t need treatment,” she said in a torn voice. “Take me to the compound.”

  As the helo carrying Sarah and Olaf lifted off, I turned to t
he medic. “Can you give us a minute?”

  She nodded and stepped back until she was out of earshot.

  I ducked my helmeted head back through the van’s side door. Takara hadn’t moved from her position, elbows on her knees, hands supporting her bowed head. I sniffed to make sure it was her, that she hadn’t been changed into something. A veneer of earth and decay hung around her; otherwise, her scent was normal.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Where have you been for the last day?”

  “Last day?” She shook her head. “Too fragmented right now. Need to rest. Refocus.”

  “You should get checked out,” I said. “At a minimum, you probably need fluids.” I was also thinking that she needed to be under vampire protocol for the next twenty-four as well. After all, she’d appeared from the same black hole those creatures had been popping in and out of.

  But Takara was still shaking her head. “Take me to the compound,” she repeated.

  I sniffed toward her again. No open wounds, meaning the vampires hadn’t fed on her. Still, she sounded rough. I watched her for another moment. I hadn’t been able to get the woman to wear a helmet; there was no way I was going to convince her to be medevacked. Exhaling, I turned to the waiting medics.

  “We’ve got her. Just keep us updated on the others.”

  At the compound, Rusty met us at the door leading in from the carport. I offered to help Takara, but she climbed out of the van under her own power, walked past Rusty without a word, and entered her room, closing the door behind her.

  “No ‘Honey, I’m home’?” Rusty lamented.

  “She needs to rest,” I said, then turned to Yoofi. “What’s the status on Dabu?”

  He smiled apologetically. “Dabu’s still gone. And this time, he won’t listen when I talk tough. He says, ‘Keep your smokes and drink, Yoofi!’ Ooh, he never want to be scared like that again.”

  “Well, do whatever it takes to get him back,” I growled. “We’re down to three now, and we need everyone at full power.”