Callendar nodded. How nice that the new guys were saying “we” now that the operation was a success. Undoubtedly, it would have been “you” if the operation had been a disaster.
“Everyone is accounted for?” Feller asked.
“No,” Jeffers said, annoyed. “We’re still finding bodies in the woods, washing up on beaches. Who knows how many have burned up? Besides, there’s a large homeless population around here, so it’s hard to know for sure. But there have been no new reported cases of violence.”
“The homeless move around,” Feller said.
“And around and around and around they go,” Abercrombie said.
Feller ignored his partner, as usual. “Did you think of setting up roadblocks?”
“We didn’t have the manpower,” Callendar answered pointedly. If these jokers had shown up a few days earlier, they might have been of some help. They’d rolled into town with a caravan of trailers and an army of techs. The state police had finally arrived as well. They’d taken over the county fairgrounds, where they were bustling about self-importantly, but not one of them had actually hit the streets yet or accomplished anything worth mentioning.
Then again, Callendar thought, if they had arrived earlier, they probably would have also tried to take credit.
“This strain is really virulent,” Jeffers said. “So all it will take is one surviving vampire to set the whole thing off again.”
“Speaking of which, did you find the vector? The vampire named Jamie?”
“Jamie the vampire?” Abercrombie echoed. “The vector vampire?”
Callendar saw Jeffers flush. Those two had been getting on each other’s nerves since the academy. “Dammit, Abercrombie! Will you shut the fu––”
“No,” Callendar interrupted, before his partner could say something he’d regret. “We think she’s left the area. But we also believe she’s a mature vampire who doesn’t leave bodies intact. It was apparently an accident that she let one of her victims get away. She was interrupted.”
“Accidents happen all the time,” Feller said.
“Yeah, you know: ‘Oops, I accidentally created a vampire,’” Abercrombie muttered.
“We need to find this Jamie and put an end to her,” said Feller. “We’ve been charged with the task of tracking her down while you two mop up.”
Mop up? Callendar thought. MOP UP? He glanced over at his partner, who looked ready to explode. “Come on, Jeffers. Now that we’ve fixed things, let’s go get our mops.”
#
Stuart was roaring out of town in his stolen Corvette––the car had tinted windows, which was why he had chosen it––when a thought struck him. He pulled over as he reached Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. The huge redwoods were like a cathedral: a pagan cathedral that welcomed wild things, uncivilized and untamed creatures. Even through the shade of the giant trees, he could see that dawn was approaching. Still, he couldn’t stand to leave his hometown without making one last statement. He made a U-turn and headed back through town until he got to the strip of beachfront motels.
He’d followed the two FBI agents for a week, hoping to catch them off-guard. But the agents were always cautious, and every night, before they went to sleep, they put crosses on their motel room door and poured a line of what Stuart guessed was holy water across the entrance. He’d never caught them unawares.
Their room was in the middle of the second floor of the Comfort Inn. Stuart knocked on the door of the room next to theirs on the right. He put on a small smile and tried not to look like a vampire. To the room’s occupant, he hoped, he would appear to be a mild-looking young fellow, with black-rimmed glasses and nicely cut hair. A studious type.
A middle-aged man––his face sunburned, with a strange-looking white stripe on his forehead from where he’d worn a cap––opened the door, seemingly unsuspecting. “Yes?” he said curiously. “Can I help you?”
Stuart had planned to talk his way into the room, but dawn was only minutes away, so instead he rushed the man, threw him to the floor, and drained him of blood. Otherwise, he left him untouched. The shower was on in the bathroom, and when it turned off, he heard a woman humming. Bonus! Stuart thought. He opened the door and sank his teeth into the woman before she could turn around. At first glance she looked younger than the man, but even in her fright she couldn’t really move the muscles of her Botoxed face. When he was finished, he laid her carefully in the bathtub.
He hurried past the crosses on the FBI agents’ door and knocked on the door to the left of theirs. This room held three teenagers, only one of whom woke up to answer the door. The kid was at that awkward age where he almost passed for a cool dude, but couldn’t quite pull it off. His cool-dude clothes, which he had clearly slept in, looked like a costume. Stuart had always hated phonies, and this sealed the kid’s fate.
The wannabe asked sleepily what the hell Stuart wanted. Stuart put his hand over the kid’s mouth and drained him, then followed the same procedure with the other two, taking just enough blood to kill them, no more. Even so, Stuart had never had so much blood. He felt bloated, like a tick, and queasy. He went to the bathroom and threw up.
But he wasn’t done.
Stuart methodically killed the occupants of every room on the second floor. Dawn was breaking as he finished. He rushed out of the last room, jumped over the balcony railing, ran to the Corvette, and threw open the door. His skin was smoking and a fire had broken out on his hand before he managed to dive inside the car. He put out the flames, then leaned back in the seat and sighed.
He had so much blood in him, he had healed almost instantly.
Stuart started the car and retraced his route out of town. It had felt good, gorging like that, despite the queasiness, but he doubted he’d ever do it again; at least not anywhere he actually lived. Though, come to think of it, going somewhere else to do it was always an option…
No. He wasn’t going to create another epidemic of vampires if he could help it. That had been his mistake, though it wasn’t something he could have known was going to happen. He’d created too many vampires too fast, and then he’d lost control of them. That wasn’t going to work in a place he wanted to keep living in. It made it too dangerous for every vampire.
No, he wouldn’t do that again. He would find a new place to live. He would create one vampire at a time. He would teach his progeny everything he knew before he moved on to create another. Each new vampire would be his, beholden to and trained by him. They would follow his commands, or he’d kill them.
Eventually, he’d have a little army. When that happened, he’d return to his hometown and finish the job of destroying it.
Chapter 29
Feller was pissed. Those two idiots, Callendar and Jeffers, had stumbled across the case of a lifetime: the kind of case that made your career, pushed you up the ladder of promotion, and made you the envy of all your rivals.
It wasn’t too late to take credit. He’d just have to hope that they’d missed one of the vampires, who hopefully would start up the epidemic again. Frankly, the more victims, the better––which would be tragic, of course, but if it happened, he and Abercrombie would be the heroes who cleaned up the mess.
He didn’t say anything to Abercrombie, who wouldn’t understand. The big guy––even bigger than his partner, and Feller wasn’t a small man––played off of everything Feller said, but he had completely different motivations for doing what they did. Abercrombie was always concerned about the victims. Of course, Feller was too. But you didn’t advance up the ladder without tracking down and destroying vampires, and the way you found vampires was to follow the victims. The bigger the vampire, the more victims there were.
Abercrombie didn’t care about advancement, but he was a good agent, and whatever their individual motivations, they were an effective team.
They’d been living in a trailer on the road for days. Feller had talked Callendar and Jeffers into letting them use their motel room while they were on alternating shifts. Feller though
t it was weird that those two had been sharing a motel room when they were supposed to have been on vacation, but he didn’t dare say anything because of all the political correctness going on these days. He didn’t want to have to go through sensitivity training again.
Of course, he was now sharing a room with Abercrombie, but that was different. That was from necessity, not by choice.
They’d gotten in about an hour before dawn to find Callendar and Jeffers already gone. All it took was a real shower and two real beds, and they’d slept most of the day away.
Feller got up and swiftly got dressed. He threw open the curtains to watch the sun descend into the ocean, then kicked the frame of Abercrombie’s bed. “Wake up, AC! They’ll be back any minute. They let us have the night shift, the dummies. Time to go hunt vampires!”
Abercrombie just groaned and rolled over, but Feller knew from experience that he would hop out of bed in a couple of minutes, fully awake. Sure enough, ten minutes later, they were both dressed and ready to go.
They stepped out onto the balcony just as the parking lot lights were going on and breathed in the humid coastal air. It was going to be a cool night, and Feller was kicking himself for not packing a heavier coat.
The door to the left of them opened and a naked middle-aged woman, her face frozen but her eyes bugging out, stumbled onto the balcony.
For a moment, Feller couldn’t process the sight. Luckily, Abercrombie reacted by drawing his pistol and shooting her three times in the chest. She fell backward, then struggled to get up, but by then Feller had pulled a stake out of his coat lining and slammed it into her heart. He heard movement behind him and quick-drew his gun––a motion he’d practiced a thousand times but never actually used before. A sunburned, middle-aged man with a white stripe across his forehead emerged from the room, and Feller shot him in the head. That put him down, and would keep him down for hours––even a vampire took time to recover from a bullet to the brain. Feller staked him, never giving him the chance.
“Where the hell did they come from?” he said, turning to Abercrombie. But his partner was busy facing down three snarling teenagers, dressed like suburban gangsta wannabes, who were advancing on him from the other side. Abercrombie shot twice, knocking down the first two, but by then, the third vampire was almost on him. Feller shot that one in the head.
They didn’t have time to stake these three vampires, because doors were opening all up and down the balcony, and every single person who emerged from those rooms was a vampire, all of them running toward the first red-blooded humans they saw. Grandmas and grandpas, parents and kids, husbands, wives, and lovers, single businessmen: all of them were converging on the two FBI agents.
Abercrombie and Feller kept firing, missing half their shots in their haste. Feller clicked on empty, reached for his extra clip, and realized it was in the glove compartment of their car. Abercrombie had already shot off most of his second clip.
Cursing, Feller and Abercrombie retreated to their room. They hadn’t brought enough weapons, Feller realized, or enough ammunition. They were trapped.
The door nearly gave way under the mass of creatures, even though crucifixes protected it. The vampires who were pushed against the door were screaming and burning, but the ones behind them ignored them. Abercrombie hadn’t said a word. Feller saw that the big man was holding a bottle of holy water up to the hallway light. It was only half full. Feller had zero bullets left in his gun, and three stakes, and he’d lost count of how many vampires had surged toward them. At least a dozen; maybe twenty or more.
Luckily for the agents, the door held. After half an hour or so, they heard shots outside and the sound of bodies hitting the balcony, the thuds shaking their room, then silence.
Abercrombie and Feller both trained their guns on the door as it opened.
“Hey, boys,” Feller heard Callendar say. “You still here?”
Feller stepped over the pile of bodies at the door and went out onto the balcony. Backup units were arriving, staking the head-shot vampires and moving bodies into the shade before the sunlight reached them. He did a quick count and arrived at eighteen bodies, though there might have been one or two more disguised by the tangle of limbs.
“Real funny,” he said.
“Funny ha ha, not funny strange,” Abercrombie clarified.
But inside, Feller was elated. Sure, he was embarrassed at having to be rescued, but he’d get over it. No one had witnessed the fight: all they would know was that four FBI agents had killed eighteen or more vampires in one blazing gunfight. It would go down in FBI history, the Bureau’s version of the OK Corral.
Feller had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t what actually happened that mattered, but what people thought had happened. It was one of the reasons he’d become the highest-rated vampire hunter in the Bureau. Callendar was an indifferent writer; his reports were bland and matter-of-fact. He’d get all the facts right, and anyone who read between the lines would see what had happened––that Feller, helped by his bumbling partner Abercrombie, had, through great effort, overcome the mistakes of the first two agents on the scene.
But by the time Feller was done telling the story, no one would even look at Callendar’s description. He might even be able to spin it a little, make Abercrombie and him the heroes who had saved their fellow agents from a trap.
Feller was thrilled for another reason.
He looked up and down the balcony at the carnage. “This was planned. It was an ambush. We’ve got an Alpha vampire on our hands.”
Chapter 30
Terrill and Sylvie were never left alone after Fitzsimmons’s power grab, except within the confines of their heavily guarded suite. There was never a moment when Sylvie wasn’t threatened by the proximity of armed guards, all of whom made it clear that their first reaction to any sign of resistance would be to hurt her. As a human, there was no way Terrill would have been able to kill all the guards before they killed Sylvie––and even as a vampire, it was going to be difficult, even if he caught them by surprise.
Terrill bided his time, hoping that the sentries would relax their vigilance or that he could find some other way to escape. He also hoped that the opposition would contact him again, since he was certain that Fontaine and Kruger, the two murdered councilors, couldn’t be the only ones chafing under Fitzsimmons’s regime. But either the opponents were lying low or the coup d’état had been more thorough than he’d realized.
They were cut off from outside communication. Even Clarkson was staying away. Terrill assumed that her sympathies were with the resistance, but he didn’t know that for sure.
And anyway, what could he do if he escaped? He had no money, no contacts here anymore. Though he had lived in London for hundreds of years, it was so changed that it seemed like a strange city. By himself, perhaps, he could have pulled it off. With Sylvie, he suspected they’d be tracked down within days, if not hours.
That was the whole point: they didn’t have to keep him trapped. They only needed to keep Sylvie under their control.
After a week of being cooped up––they were allowed to go for walks in the park, but not much more––he caught one of the day guards sneaking admiring looks at Sylvie. The vampire appeared young; he was blue-eyed and had floppy blond hair, and looked as if he belonged on the beaches of California instead of the streets of London. Of course, there was no way of knowing a vampire’s real age, but this one had the manner of the newly fanged. He stuttered when he spoke to Terrill, as though starstruck.
His name was Cory, and according to him, his Maker was one of Fitzsimmons’s chief lieutenants. Cory didn’t have any political leanings, himself, one way or the other––though of course, he thought Terrill’s Rules of Vampire were wonderful. Was there anything he could do for Terrill and Sylvie? “I wouldn’t say anything to anyone,” he promised.
“Can you see if we can’t visit more of London?” Sylvie asked, and sure enough, they were given permission to go out more, as long as the
y were accompanied by enough guards.
Terrill didn’t buy Cory’s friendly act. He quit talking to Cory, and after a few more days, the blond vampire stopped showing up on guard duty. The next time Fitzsimmons dropped in on them, Cory was one of his bodyguards. He shrugged and winked when he saw Terrill glaring at him.
Terrill’s old cynicism and caution were returning. He’d spent years by himself and, without meaning to, he’d lost much of his wariness. Now, back in the big city, it was coming back to him. The bright lights were rapidly losing their glamour.
He started noticing the contrast of Sylvie’s youth and his age. He’d been attracted to her because of her freshness and optimism––the same reasons he’d been attracted to her sister, Jamie. He’d let his years drop away to live in the present with someone who was seeing everything for the first time. It hadn’t seemed odd.
Now, living among these old, decadent vampires once again, the differences between him and Sylvie were becoming glaring. Sylvie didn’t seem to notice. She knew they were in danger, and she sometimes apologized for being a burden, but there was no disguising the fact that she loved the adventure: new restaurants every night, sightseeing and visiting tourist traps on cloudy days. She wanted to visit the nightclubs, too, but most evenings, Terrill just wanted to go home and go to bed. She went back reluctantly, but once there, she made love to him every night and every morning as if each time was their last time.
He loved her more than his own life, but he was starting to get annoyed with her.
“You must be ready to run at any time,” he said quietly into her ear one night when they were in bed. “When I say ‘Go,’ you need to follow me without question.”
“I understand,” she said. “But come on! I’ve never been out of Bend in my whole life. This is all so interesting to me. I want to explore the whole city. I want to meet everyone here!”
“I know,” he said, his heart softening. What is wrong with me? he wondered. Then the full extent of the danger they were in sank in again, and his smile faded away. “But you must understand, they are trying to seduce you. They want you to stay.”
The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 2): Rule of Vampire Page 14