The Feds kept firing, but even they were starting to retreat a little as the creatures—the vampires, Alex admitted with reluctance—came on.
Three of them swarmed over one of the Feds. The other agents directed their fire toward those three, which created enough of a pause for more of the things to race from the motel room.
They ran out into morning sunlight. Alex had always thought sunlight was fatal to vampires—in the movies, anyway.
Apparently this was no movie. The screams of the agent sounded real enough.
As the SWAT team moved in, Alex fell back farther, and allowed himself a moment of relief. Whoever or whatever those things were, the Feds and the SWAT cops would wrap them up.
Or so he fervently hoped.
45
PHOSPHOROUS ROUNDS CUT THROUGH the bloodsuckers like hot steel through ice cream. But it didn’t stop them, and the TRU-UV lights were just as useless as the genuine sunlight.
Marina had known a lot of frightening moments during her career as a vampire hunter, but none quite as chilling as the realization that the old ways of killing them no longer applied.
“Fall back!” she screamed as the vamps swarmed toward them. Whether anyone heard her over the racket of gunfire, the boots of the SWAT cops, and the shrieks of the attacking vampires, she couldn’t tell. Her team held their ground, guns blasting, so she stayed with them. She picked one of the vampires, aimed at its head, and squeezed off a long burst. The thing’s head exploded, and it went down, momentum carrying it another several feet before it collapsed. At least that still did the trick.
Then four of them gathered around Jimbo. His gun rocked and flared but his shots were missing their heads, firing low into groins, bellies, and chests. The bloodsuckers were hurt but not destroyed. Jimbo’s eyes went wide, his mouth falling open, and Marina could see the precise moment at which he realized he wouldn’t be walking away from this one. She opened fire, hesitant at first because she didn’t want any of her shots to accidentally hit Jimbo, but once it looked like he wouldn’t live without the assist, she had to risk it.
She hit one vampire in the back of the skull, sending fragments and bits of brain sailing in an arc over the others. Claws raked across Jimbo’s nose and cheek, slicing into his left eye and trailing ocular fluid and blood in its wake. Jimbo screamed. Marina shifted her aim and blasted that one’s head into jelly.
“Look out!” Kat shouted. Marina caught a glimpse of a shape rushing toward her and swung her weapon around. Too late, though—the bloodsucker plowed into her and drove her to the pavement, slavering fangs snapping just above her face.
Brick down, Dragon Lady down, Angel down. New strength continued to course through Rocco, and he was sure the others felt it, too. But the meeting had turned into an ambush; Larry’s fault, or Walker’s, he wasn’t sure which. Fixing blame didn’t matter as much now as getting out in one piece. Rocco cared about everyone in his den, the new ones as well as the long-timers, and seeing even one fall was like a stake to the heart.
He couldn’t stop to mourn, though. Once the barrage on the motel room began, they all knew their only hope was to get out, scatter and re-form later.
Or else to kill their attackers.
The initial assault had been carried out by a group of men and women without uniforms, but with hightech weaponry, including lights that probably would have killed them fifteen minutes earlier. Operation Red-Blooded, Rocco guessed. Rumors about them had spread through the vampire community over the past couple of years. Behind them came what appeared to be local law enforcement in assault or riot gear—heavily padded, with visored helmets, but with traditional weapons that were largely meaningless to the nosferatu.
Chip, Goldie, Ciara, and Kenton teamed up against one of the bigger attackers, a man holding his automatic weapon in both hands and strafing them like a madman. The woman who seemed to be in charge, slight but fierce, took out Ciara and Goldie almost immediately, but then Shiloh charged her and the two of them crashed to the ground.
Rocco moved to help Shiloh, but one of those assault-clad cops shot him in the upper chest and the impact knocked him back several steps. The guy fired again and hot pain tore through Rocco’s shoulder.
The cop might get lucky and get in a head shot, Rocco knew. Enraged, he vaulted one of the nonuniformed people and sailed across fifteen feet of parking lot, landed, sprang off his toes, and flew another eight feet toward the cop. Another shot scraped Rocco’s back but did little damage. When he got his hands on the cop, he yanked the man off the ground and raised him above his head, spinning him around several times, then hurled him into the others. As he flew away, the cop dropped his machine gun. Rocco scraped it up and pulled down on the trigger, holding it, feeling the gun stutter as bullets churned into the other cops.
When he had cleared some space, he turned and aimed it at the woman Shiloh wrestled with. Shiloh would want the kill herself, of course, but at this point Rocco was impatient and anxious enough to be willing to use human weapons against them. He waited for Shiloh to give him an opening, and as soon as she did, he would take the shot.
“My God in heaven,” Greg Fielding said.
Alex didn’t speak, but inwardly, he echoed the sentiment. Those things were almost unstoppable. Four of them had surrounded one of the government agents, in spite of what must have been dozens of bullets biting through them. Blood and flesh were thrown into the air. The last time Alex saw the agent, a guy who looked as sturdy as an oak tree and as tall as a skyscraper, he had someone’s teeth shredding his neck and was being dragged to the ground, flailing and crying out for mercy.
A female vampire—Alex had decided to stop denying the evidence right in front of him—bowled over Marina. Another male had taken one of the SWAT officers’ guns and used it on some of the cops. Yet another engaged one of the Feds, who was shooting him with his weapon’s muzzle pressed right up against the vampire’s chest, but the vampire was ignoring the shots and bringing his open maw close to the agent’s face. A tongue like a long strip of shoe leather flicked out, scraping the horrified man’s cheek.
“We have to get out of here,” Larissa said.
“Yeah,” Greg agreed. “There’s nothing we can do. Call in an air strike, maybe.”
Alex didn’t offer an opinion, but he started to back away, afraid to tear his gaze away from the carnage. The vampires were impossibly strong—a single leap could clear the distance between them. As long as the three detectives didn’t present an immediate threat, he thought the vampires would leave them alone, but the second they became a problem, they were dead.
That was his theory, anyway. He no longer cared about Walker, about anything but getting safely away from this slaughter, and he believed that the three of them could make it to shelter if they kept their cool.
But now one of the vampires spotted them—he could feel its gaze burning into him—and called out something, and then it was tearing across the parking lot toward them.
“Run, Larissa!” Alex shouted. He put his body between her and the vampire and raised his duty weapon. Head, he told himself, hit it in the head. He had been watching, and that was the only thing he’d seen that worked.
Greg was backing up, not looking behind him, and he bumped into Alex just as he squeezed the trigger. Alex’s shot went wild, and Greg jumped at the report, startled by the sudden bang.
And a thought flashed through Alex’s head, just a glimmer of one but it might work, might allow him and Larissa to reach safety. It was wrong, it was dirty, and he didn’t care. Before he had even thought it all the way through, he was acting on it.
Greg was still off balance from being startled, from running into Alex as a shot was fired. It didn’t take much to trip him; a sweep of Alex’s right leg, behind Greg’s left and in front of his right. Greg lost his balance, tumbled headfirst onto the asphalt. He caught himself on his palms, but his gun skidded from his hand.
“Run!” Alex cried again. He turned—had already been in motion a
s he tripped Greg, so it would look like he didn’t even know the detective had fallen, and moved to grab Larissa’s arm, to drag her along as he hauled ass out of there. This part he also hadn’t worked out ahead of time, just taking each moment as it came. The only thing that mattered was leaving Greg as a sacrifice, to slow the vampire down—and at the same time, to eliminate him from Larissa’s life, and to make sure he didn’t go out as a hero but as a klutz, someone who had fallen on his face and lost his weapon.
It was cowardly.
Alex couldn’t remember ever claiming not to be a coward, as long as he had lived. It wouldn’t be a claim he could ever make after this.
But he would live, and so would Larissa. Those were the important things.
Maybe he would lose a night’s sleep or two over Greg, but he had never liked the guy anyway.
And Larissa would need some comforting, a shoulder to cry on, strong arms to hold her through the nights, right?
46
MARINA DIDN’T THINK SHE would ever stop hearing Jimbo’s screams. They were high pitched, horrified, scraping at her brain like rusty nails being tugged from hard wood. Marina was wrestling with a female vampire, but Jimbo’s cries seared their way into her attention in spite of her immediate situation.
The bloodsucking bitch was strong. She had knocked Marina down backward and straddled her. Marina couldn’t bring the gun around to any useful position, so she abandoned it. She tried to wriggle and writhe, but the vampire had her pinned down and was leaning forward, trying to close those nasty teeth on Marina. Marina had her left arm raised, elbow bent, forearm against the vampire’s upper chest to hold her back. It wouldn’t work for long, though. Already the strain on Marina’s arm and shoulder was intense, her arm ready to snap under the vampire’s pressure.
She refused to let the bloodsucker beat her. Jimbo was gone, she was sure, and she heard cries of pain and terror from other quarters—maybe her people, maybe cops, she couldn’t tell. She had lost too many people to the bloodsuckers. A mission that had been fun and games had taken on a new, more serious nature, and losing now would mean her people would never be avenged, the deaths on her conscience for whatever eternity waited for sinners.
Her gun useless, Marina’s right hand snaked a knife from its scabbard: eight-inch blade, blood grooves, serrated top edge. Sharp as a surgeon’s favorite scalpel. It had worked back in New York; maybe it would again. The bloodsucker was leaning hard on her, snapping at her. Drool dripped from her fangs, splashing hot against Marina’s face. Marina twisted her head away, kicked the vampire in the back. Anything to distract her from the knife hand.
“Just hold still,” the vampire hissed. “Surrender is so sweet … you have no idea.”
“Surrender …” Marina replied, “just pisses … me … off!” As she spoke, she arched her back, bucking up, and lashed out with the knife. She slashed at the vampire’s left forearm, the hand holding Marina’s shoulder against the ground, nearly severing it.
The vampire squealed, cursed, and fell forward, off balance from the sudden attack. Marina brought her left elbow up and smashed it into her teeth, and at the same time drove the knife into where her heart should have been. The knife wasn’t silver or wood or anything like that, just steel, but it would hurt just the same. The vampire threw her head back and released a mournful wail. Marina took advantage of the moment to swipe the blade across her throat.
Vampire blood showered her skin and clothes. She twisted out from under the wounded vampire, gained her feet, twined her fingers through the beast’s long hair and yanked her head back, loose on its damaged neck.
“Your turn to surrender, bloodsucker,” Marina said as she brought the knife forward to cut the rest of the thing’s head off. “Oh, wait … I’m not giving you that chance!”
“Greg! Oh God, Greg!”
Alex caught the look in Larissa’s eyes and realized his mistake. Greg Fielding wasn’t just a boy toy for her. She genuinely liked him, and if Alex was responsible for his death, even by accident, she would never forgive him.
Greg was trying to scramble to his feet, but his palms were bloody and they weren’t supporting his weight, and his stupid hard-soled cop shoes wouldn’t gain traction on the crumbling asphalt. One of the vampires had almost reached him. She looked like a little old lady, but her hands were hooked into gnarled claws and her mouth was full of wicked teeth, and her wrinkled face was twisted into a ferocious rictus.
She was about two seconds away from tearing Greg’s head off.
And forever destroying whatever friendship Alex and Larissa might have had.
Alex darted back to Greg’s side, getting to the fallen detective at the same time the vampire did. She was reaching for Greg’s head. Alex thrust his weapon out until it was almost touching her forehead. She stopped, noticing the barrel just before tearing into Greg, and hissed. She brought a hand up to swat the gun away, but Alex squeezed the trigger.
The .38 slug tore a compact, nickel-sized hole between her eyes, but it blew a chunk out the back of her head as big around as the mouth of a juice glass. She stopped short, her claw just missing Greg’s face, the hand reaching for Alex dropping to her side. A surprised look settled on her face. Alex fired twice more, through her right eye and the center of her forehead. She took two unsteady steps back, like she was fighting a wave of dizziness, and then she keeled over sideways.
“Thanks, man,” Greg said, finally regaining his feet. “I thought she had me.”
“Get your gun,” Alex said. He didn’t want the man’s thanks, didn’t want to be reminded that he had saved Greg’s life at all. He turned back to Larissa, who had watched the whole thing in something like shock, her own weapon held loosely at her side. “You okay, Larissa?” he asked.
She started to move. He thought she was nodding, or shaking her head, but then her body shuddered and started to fall, revealing the vampire behind her, a skinny kid who looked about fourteen, and his hand was drenched in blood, holding a still-beating heart, and as she flopped down Alex saw the hole in her back where the kid had punched in and taken it, taken the heart that was the only thing in the world Alex had truly wanted to possess.
Rocco looked up from the bloody throat of a government agent and saw the small one, the woman, holding a dripping knife in one hand and Shiloh’s hair in the other, about to sever her head.
He was twenty feet away. Twenty-five. The battle raged between him and them. He had been so certain Shiloh would take her he hadn’t bothered to watch their struggle. “Shiloh!” he cried, his voice thick with anguish and rage.
He poised to leap the distance. But Kenton got there first, driving his shoulder into the woman and knocking her a dozen feet away. Shiloh slumped to the blacktop. Rocco reached her in an instant. He scooped her into his arm, tucking her against his shoulder, holding her head steady on her savaged neck with his other hand. “Help me!” he called. “Someone help!”
Winston appeared at his side, then Nightmare and Goldie. “Start the RV! We need to get her out of here!”
“On it,” Nightmare said. He dashed off toward the RV, ignoring the bullets that struck him. The attackers, Red-Blooded and local police, were fewer in number now, and mostly tending to their own wounded, but a few kept trying to shoot the nosferatu, either not realizing or not caring that their efforts were largely fruitless.
“Protect her!” Rocco commanded. He rose to his feet, hoisting her with him. A bullet struck him in the lower back and he staggered but held on to her and kept his balance. Then his den closed ranks around them and they rushed to the RV’s open door.
The sides were bullet riddled, and one tire was shredded. No doubt the authorities would be able to find it again, even track it with one of the helicopters Rocco heard chattering through the sky toward them. He didn’t care about any of that. All that concerned him at the moment was giving Shiloh a safe place to lie still and recover. Their kind healed quickly, but a wound this bad would still take time. He could fashion a bandage
of some sort in the vehicle. He just needed some breathing space.
Inside, he took her to the bed in the main cabin, laying her down carefully, then sat beside her to hold her head in place. “Drive!” he screamed. “Get us out of here!”
Nightmare, behind the wheel, shouted an affirmation, and the RV’s big engine rumbled as he shifted gears. They started rolling, bumping over the curb and onto the street. More bullets thwacked into the body, and a window shattered. The damaged tire flapped, then came off and the thing tilted left, scraping on that side. They couldn’t go for long like this, but if they could escape from the immediate battle scene, Rocco would be happy with that. He would improvise from there. Play things by ear.
That had worked for him so far, and for a long time. He and his den had dodged police, Elder Death Squads determined to thin the vampire herd, and except for that one disastrous raid, the agents of Operation Red-Blooded. It would work again. He wouldn’t lose Shiloh.
He couldn’t say if he loved her or not. He only knew that he didn’t want to be without her.
When he imagined walking in the sun, it was always with her. Hand in hand under a sparkling blue sky, feeling the warmth denied them for so long.
It was a dream, a beautiful, improbable dream, but he wasn’t about to give up on it now.
He held Shiloh’s head on her neck and felt the unsteady rocking of the RV as it raced away.
47
ONE OF THE VAMPIRES started screaming, clutching another one to his chest like a father carrying a daughter with a twisted ankle. Alex’s awareness of this was only incidental; he stood in frozen silence watching the beast who had killed Larissa hold her heart to his lips like a juicy orange and drink from it.
This vampire turned toward the other one’s screams, and that shook Alex free from paralysis. He raised the .38 and as the vampire started to run toward its fellows, he unloaded the magazine into its skull. The thing dropped, Larissa’s heart rolling from its grip onto the pavement. Bits of grit and asphalt stuck to it, coating it with gray.
30 Days of Night: Light of Day Page 22