“Come on, guys, just follow my lead and we shouldn’t have any problems,” Dial said.
“Who the hell are you?” a strange voice sounded, typically deep and gruff. It was almost like you couldn’t join the VVV unless your voice was like a jet plane preparing for takeoff, even if you were female.
And, looking like all the others cloned from whatever factory they came from, a huge VVV warrior bounced towards us from the main entrance of the mansion.
“Who the hell do you think?” returned Dial in his natural, rather fierce voice.
“Oh.” The clone stopped just outside the yellow circle thrown from the powerful outside spotlight.
“Just keep your hats low and think big,” whispered Dial to the prof and me.
I looked down at my crotch. Thinking big hadn’t helped me in that department. With a shuddering sigh, I stopped just short of the VVV soldier.
“I wanted to congratulate you on a mission well done, Brother Dial.”
“As you well know, Brother Nail, it is not wholly finished, for two of the scum had escaped.”
“It could not be helped, Brother Dial. You had your role to act out. You can’t keep track of all the turds in the toilet bowl. Your job was to flush.”
“Compassion and love of death make a good warrior, and you are both of those, Brother Nail. Down with the vampire lovers!”
“May they twist and writhe in hell and choke on Charlaine Harris’s soiled panties!”
“True blood, indeed,” Dial said, in what was apparently some little inside joke.
It grew quiet and I watched their massive chests heaving in the night. Boy, they sure could get worked up over these things. These VVV freaks were almost as obsessed as the Vampire Club.
“Why aren’t your friends joining us, Dial?”
“Er, uh, er new recruits.”
“Didn’t know we were getting new recruits on such a crucial assignment.” He pointed at my vampire satchel. “And that’s not regulation issue.”
“What rank are you, Brother Nail?”
“Plebe.”
“Are you part of the decision making?”
“No, but—”
“Does the Inner Circle tell you everything?”
“They usually inform us of new—”
“Well, not this time, and I have moved up in rank since this assignment. I am now Cojones Dial. I am to train them in the field.”
“This is a rare occasion, Brother Cojones Dial. I’ve never heard of such methods employed.”
“You have now, Brother Nail! Now drop and give me fifty.”
“Now?”
“Hundred!”
“Yes, Sir, Sir, yes, Sir, Sir!” he bark-chanted as he dropped onto his hands and began pumping and grunting.
The whole time I dared not look up for fear of being recognized. Dial gently raised his size-eighteen boot, eased it over Nail’s neck, and then stomped down.
“Will be out for a hundred and seventeen minutes. Andy, grab an ankle.”
I wrapped both arms around Nail’s left ankle, and as we began to drag him off, I was not surprised to see Dial move ahead. Nearly dragging me along with the limp body. In the end, I was only holding on to a pant leg.
“Now,” said Dial, “for the tricky part.”
And the professor and I followed him up into the mansion.
Chapter Thirty-three
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“Pardon me?” I asked Dial.
“Shit.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
“Is there a problem, Dial?” interjected the professor.
Dial pointed behind me and said, “Shit.”
I turned to see the rapidly moving figure of our host, Granddaddy Grandmaster, otherwise known as Grandmaster. He moved like a two-legged crab, bony but determined.
Grandmaster was surrounded by a small entourage. They were jabbering away wildly, and I was not surprised to hear my name mentioned once or twice.
“Shit,” hissed Dial once again, for we were standing quite motionless in the doorway of the mansion. We were about to cross paths with a vicious pack of VVV.
“C’mon,” said Dial, turning his back. “Let’s get in and get out of here.”
I was all for the idea and was turning my narrow shoulders to carry out Dial’s little gem of an idea. Grandmaster bellowed, “Dial? Is that Dial? I can’t tell one of you monsters from the rest!”
“It is I, Granddaddy Grandmaster,” he said, and I hoped the fear in his voice was mistaken for respect.
“Dial. Good.”
Granddaddy made his sweet way along the walk and was soon on the porch, standing boldly next to me. “Excuse me, Grandmaster,” I said in my deepest, most manly voice as I removed my pulverized foot from under his boot. I lowered my head and hunched down, grateful for the silly little caps the VVV wore.
He turned to me. “Isn’t it a little late for selling cookies, little girl?”
So much for my ego.
I was tongue-tied, but I decided to simply open my mouth and rely solely on my primal instinct to get me through this sticky situation. “Can I use your toilet?”
“Yeah, sure, just be quick, we have some important business at hand. Now let’s see, it’s on the left of the main entrance of the right hallway towards the center of the room to your left. If you keep to your right and then finally turn left at the library which would be on your right, no, left, you shouldn’t have any problem. You getting this, little girl?”
“No, Mister.”
“Who wants to help this little girl to the potty?”
I saw feet fidgeting and then slowly stepping back. “Anger?” Grandmaster asked.
“No, not me, Grandmaster,” said a low voice. “Little girls make me nervous.”
“Didn’t you just take out an entire Baltic Army of Darkness a few years ago?”
“Sort of. Just their elite forces.”
“And yet little girls make you nervous?”
“They whimper when you kill them—I mean, when you don’t buy any cookies from them.”
“How about you, Rip?” Grandmaster said.
“Don’t know where it’s at.”
“Why?”
“Never used it here.”
“How long have you been living here?”
“I was transferred here from East Germany two years ago.”
“Have you, er, gone to the bathroom since?”
“No.”
“I can scarcely believe that, Rip.”
“It’s true, Grandmaster. I’ve spent some of my training in a Tibetan monastery, and they taught me many wonders. But as to the wonder pertaining to this conversation, they taught me the art of elimination of bodily fluids through skin.”
“This is possible?”
“Oh, yes, for I am living proof. The process of evaporation is a constant process for me. It’s sort of like I’m going to the bathroom continuously, except, of course, it’s a fine mist.”
“What about on cloudy or cold days?”
“I bloat like a pig.”
“And you smell like one, too”
That drew a big laugh. Grandmaster gave a rueful sigh. “Where do we find you guys?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Rip felt it necessary to answer. “We need work, Grandmaster. Once we retire from the armed services, there’s not much else trained killers can do.”
“I’ll take him,” said Dial, which fit right in with the plan I’d been forming in my mind. It made me think about the professor’s sixth sense, though I didn’t see how much could penetrate Dial’s thick skull.
“Yes,” said another voice. “Let the hero take the girl. Let the hero who let two fucking vampire lovers escape take the little girl.”
I detected some hostility in the voice but couldn’t be sure. With this crowd, jokes were mean and violence was funny.
Instead of responding, Dial grabbed my hand and led me into the house. In his other hand trailed the
professor. “Better get the other girl to go at the same time, or this will take all night,” Dial said.
Grandmaster barked an order for Dial to hurry, for there was important business at hand and to come to the meeting room immediately after. Once inside, we passed the goons guarding the cellar door and then made a right down a hallway.
“That was close,” said the professor.
“So what now?” I asked, and any prior embarrassment from having been called a girl clearly showed its effects by my utterly deflated ego.
“How come I always have to come up with the plans?” complained Dial, as we turned into one of many rooms along the hall.
“Because you work here,” I retorted.
“Not anymore.”
“True. Well, we’re inside, the next thing we have to do is get past the guards and into the cellar. There are only two of them and three of us.”
Dial only needed to glance at the professor and me for the briefest of moments. “One of us.”
The three of us sat there in the quiet of the room: one scratched a head, another rubbed a gray beard, and the last looked down into his limp, wrinkled pants, constantly reassuring himself.
Chapter Thirty-four
“Any ideas?” asked Dial a minute later, as if the light of reason might have just beamed from a hole in the sky or a spaceship’s SuperSmart ray.
“Not me,” I said.
“Me, neither,” said the professor. “I am flummoxed, discombobulated, bemazed—”
“Elevator,” I said, for no reason other than to derail the professor on his trip down Thesaurus Lane
We stood there, forming a triangle in the otherwise empty room as the bustle of activity went on around us. Whatever Grandmaster was going to announce must be big, big news.
“How many rooms does this place have?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I do know that about thirty-five are being presently occupied,” Dial said.
“All on account of us?”
“Yep. Nothing else was happening anyway, since most of the vampires are rounded up. There was a waiting list for this assignment.”
“Waiting list?”
“Yes. The elite squadrons are doing the mop-up work. The rest of the VVVV is busy spying on organizations like your Vampire Club and guarding shitty vampire graves around the world.”
“Where are some of the other sites?” asked Professor L.
“On all the continents, except Antarctica. The most are in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Next would be Asia, then North and South America, though only few are in South America.”
“What about Australia?” I asked.
“Well, being both a country and continent it is unique—” the professor started.
“No. I mean, are there any vampire graves in Australia?”
“Two.”
“So, according to the VVV, how many vampires are known to exist?” the professor asked, true researcher that he was.
“Twenty-three.”
I processed that new bit of information into the vast mental vampire file. How many must have been completely obliterated over the years, the wonderful, noble species that could have taught us so much about the workings of the natural world? Not to mention the supernatural world?
I tried to picture our drowsy vampire below, and inspiration struck. “Basements are usually below the first floor, right?”
Maybe they thought it was a trick question or something, but it took the professor and Dial a moment to finally answer: “Right.”
“Now let’s see, we probably aren’t too far from the basement entrance—am I right Dial?”
“Down the hall and to the left.”
“So, in all probability, we’re standing over the basement now?”
“Or damned close to it,” said Dial. “It probably runs all over.”
“What are you proposing?” the professor wanted to know, his head no doubt blurring with possibilities that didn’t add up.
“The same way we always get to vampires,” I said. “Dig.”
“Sounds like a prison story,” mused the professor.
Thinking of the encaged vampire, I said, “Prison indeed. Only, instead of getting out, we’re getting in.”
Chapter Thirty-five
“How old’s the house?” I asked.
“Built in 1730, or so I was told in my debriefing,” Dial said.
“Colonial period, obviously,” said the professor, as if everybody should be an expert in American architecture when most of us just wanted a house.
“Did they have concrete then?” I asked innocently enough.
“I don’t know. Professor?”
“It’s long been around in some form or another, usually made from clay or limestone or other minerals. Are you suggesting that there might be concrete under the floorboards and it might stop our rather crude—but creative—plan of boring through the floor and into the cellar?”
“More or less.”
Dial reached down, shoved his fingers between two floorboards and parted them like a frat boy planting a wedgie, and with a groan and pop of wood, he pulled free a plank.
We all gathered around the rectangular hole and peered into it. A dull, bluish flicker of light shone up at our peering faces. I couldn’t tell exactly where the glow was coming from, and said as much to the duo.
“Me, either,” said Dial.
“The important thing,” said the professor, in lecture mode, “is that we have found an alternate route into the Vampire Laumer’s tomb.”
And, to me, that was about as important as things got in my life.
“I would offer to help with those floorboards,” I said, “and to be perfectly honest with you—”
Dial, not even taking his eyes off me, reached down and pulled out three more six-inch floorboards. The man was not man but a man-god. I was more relieved than ever that he wasn’t a rival for Janice’s hand and other organs.
“That’s fine with me,” said Dial. “Then you can be the first down.”
“How far down do you think it is?” I asked.
The suggestion then proffered by Dial was not for the faint of heart, but it had a “teen” in it.
“I’ll go,” I said. “And if I plummet to my death, Professor L, I want you to tell my mother I really do love—naw, forget I mentioned it. Tell her ‘Anita Blake rocks.’ Anyway, here goes.”
I dropped to my belly, then bounced back up. I looked into Dial’s dangerous eyes. “You did say me, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I dropped down to my belly again and whispered a silent prayer.
“You say something?” asked the professor.
“Just my prayers.”
“Is there a vampire god?” asked Dial.
“Waiting.” And with that pleasant thought, I dropped over the edge.
Chapter Thirty-six
Hanging by my fingertips, I reached down with my toes as far as they could go but met only empty air.
And then somebody was prying my fingers free. I looked up, shocked.
“Sorry, Andy,” the professor was saying, “but we’ve got to get this show on the road, and we can’t have you hanging around.”
And as I fell into space, one thought ran through my mind: with friends like theeeeeeeeez—
And then I landed. What exactly on, I couldn’t say. Especially with the air knocked out of me.
“You okay down there?” It was the professor asking, the good-for-nothing, low-down....
“I’m fine, you old fart.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m fine, you’re all heart.”
Then the professor said to Dial, “I timed his fall, and it took him approximately one point three seconds to land, and that’s roughly twenty-four feet.”
A second point three later somebody was standing next to me. Out of nowhere. Just standing there.
Before I could scream from shock, a hand snaked out and hushed m
e. “I’ve been trained to land silently at fifty feet without a parachute.”
And, of course, that was Dial speaking.
I nodded, heart still hammering from its near failure. When I regained what little composure I owned, I looked up and saw the professor teetering at the edge of the hole.
“C’mon professor, I’ll catch you.”
No, that wasn’t me talking.
However, the professor was distinctly talking to himself, and I could barely make out: “Oh my, Oh, Oh, Oh my. This is not good.” And then he tipped into the hole....
But did not fall. Instead he dangled freely in the air as if suspended by a meathook.
“They got him,” hissed Dial.
And he was right. It had been a hand that snaked out and now held him suspended over the hole. A moment later, the professor disappeared and Grandmaster’s head was in his place, and what was amazing was they both filled the same amount of space in the hole. I put two and two together and figured the professor had been caught and that we were no doubt close to it also.
Things didn’t look good, especially not with Grandmaster’s distorted, ugly face peering at me.
Even the probable proximity of my first vampire wasn’t enough to make me happy.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Grandmaster waved an angry fist. “Now, we’ll give you one cha—”
“Hold on a second,” Dial shouted up at him.
“Hold on?” Raul turned sharply to one of his lurking associates, and as Dial pulled me in close, I heard Raul say, “Can you believe that traitor bastard told me to hold on?”
But now Dial was speaking into my ear: “We won’t give him a chance to blackmail us, so come on.”
Dial simply moved in a direction at random, I assumed, and I could only follow.
The Vampire Club Page 11