Graveyard Shift

by Michael F. Haspil

  “Where is it?”

  Marcus shrugged his shoulders and made a “damned if I know” face. He moved his arm in a wide arc to denote the general direction he thought the wolf had gone.

  Then Marcus was gliding toward the storm drain, in a way only a vampire could move, nearly melting from one place to another. And then, there was one shadow too many.

  Alex fired. A yelp rewarded him. He’d winged it at least. Then he could see its eyes. Despite his years of experience and even given what he was, his breath caught in his chest and it was as if his entire body were suddenly heavier. Ambient light reflected back at him through the thing’s eyes, and gave the impression that they were glowing.

  Alex racked the shotgun and fired again. This time he missed. He couldn’t figure out how and then realized he’d overshot it. It was damned fast. The blast turned it from its charge.

  Now the vague shape moved into a light pool under one of the streetlamps. It was a black blur. Maybe only twenty yards from him. Time slowed to a crawl. Alex could see gore and spittle spilling from its jaws. Even as his hands racked the shotgun again, he knew he would not be able to get off another shot. He was moving too slowly.

  Another blast hit the wolf in its hindquarters, half spinning it around. It yelped, lost its footing, and went down hard. Automatic and semiautomatic fire erupted from behind Alex, sending a hail of bullets in the direction of the wolf. Alex had a chance to fire. More silver shot flew at the wolf. The pattern of the shotgun made half the pellets go wide, sending them to strike sparks off the pavement surrounding the injured animal. Alex racked the shotgun twice more, getting rid of the shot rounds and loading a slug.

  Another blast struck the wolf midbody just as it was getting to its feet. It made a tormented gurgling sound. Its eyes stared at Alex, into his soul. Imploring. Pleading. He took careful aim.

  The wolf snarled and opened its jaws wide, its feral nature once again asserting itself. Alex fired. Just as the slug smashed into its skull, automatic weapons fire from multiple weapons raked across its body.

  He could hear the men behind him shouting exultantly, “We got it! It’s down! It’s down!”

  Alex felt sick to his stomach. This wasn’t so much a hunt as an execution.

  He heard one of the men from the other group call for medical attention. The man on the ground, his voice high-pitched with fear, was saying over and over again, “No, it just scratched me. It’s not a bite. It’s not a bite. It just scratched me.”

  Alex didn’t know if he was trying to convince himself or the others; probably both.

  He looked at the wolf. It had that misshapen quality to it where it looked like something in between animal and human. There was no question it was dead. The body had suffered an incredible amount of damage but it was still all too recognizable. Already it was shedding much of the hair and starting to look more and more like the thin naked body of a young woman. The SRT members reached it and started to huddle around it.

  He stood over it—her. For a brief moment, he was looking down on his daughter’s face and the high priest was telling him that there was nothing they could do—that the accursed, vile, and vengeful Neithikret must have her payment. That was long ago, in his black land of Kemet, and there were matters that pressed in the present.

  Alex wrenched himself away. As he turned, his gaze met Marcus’s dead eyes and he knew that Marcus was lost with his own ghosts, and feeling similar, if not the same, emotions.

  Marcus went to the body and crouched down next to it.

  “Are you seeing this? No, of course not.”

  “What?” Alex didn’t want to turn around.

  “She’s got a stamp on her arm here. A blood-club stamp.”

  Alex forced himself to turn around. That didn’t make any sense. The vampires would never feed on a thrope if they knew what she was.

  “She was a bleeder?”

  Marcus gingerly moved the body. He checked the inside of the upper arms, the inside of her thighs, her neck, looking for telltale signs. Alex thought it was an impossible task. The body had innumerable wounds on it.

  “I do not think so.”

  “Could she have masked her scent in some way? I mean, why would they even let her in the club?”

  Marcus said nothing but Alex could see he was lost in thought.

  “What have you got?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. It reminded me of an old…” Marcus paused, searching for the right word. “… story. Very queer.”

  Marcus stood and walked away from the body. Alex left him to his thoughts as they headed back toward the hunter truck in silence.

  Several SRT members ran past them. One of them asked as he ran by, “Hey, is that it?”

  Neither Marcus nor Alex answered.

  They heard the man shout, “Fuckin’ A! They got it!” Then they heard him emit a surprised “Oh” as he saw the body. His exuberance turned to shock, horror, and disgust, and he lost his dinner in loud splashes.

  That seemed to break the seal, and Alex heard other members of the team stepping away from the body and retching.

  Yeah, they got it all right.

  15

  Thursday, August 12, 12:34 A.M.

  Alex walked past the hunter truck without saying a word. Marcus and he both nodded to Zorzi and Garza as a sort of signal that it was their problem to deal with the cleanup. Although it remained unspoken, both Alex and Marcus wanted to get away from this place before Constance arrived. She was always a by-the-book person, but with her promotion and pending command of the Nocturn Affairs Bureau, she’d be even more of a stickler for detail.

  There would be questions and a post-op out-brief. That would probably happen anyway, but if they could make it back to the Explorer and secure the weapons, there might be a chance they could slip away.

  Alex’s mind was already drifting back to the club and the Ancient within. The recent thoughts of his first life had brought back the memory of the feelings he’d had at the club, the sense of that primeval malevolence seeking him out in the ether. He hoped that Marcus was wrong, though his long centuries of experience meant he rarely was. If there actually was an Ancient in that club and he hadn’t made contact with Marcus, that pretty much meant one of two things. Either he didn’t know that Marcus was in the city, or he didn’t want to have anything to do with him. The first wasn’t that big a deal, but Marcus’s treatment at the club told him it was more likely the latter. That pretty much signaled that among the handful of Ancients left in the world, this one was not one of the good guys.

  They passed the squad cars, which were already breaking up the perimeter. The city couldn’t afford to have this many resources in one place for too long. If word got out … Alex didn’t want to think about it. They reached the Explorer, and Marcus began unloading the shells from his shotgun. They were momentarily plunged into darkness as the large banks of tactical lights switched off.

  Alex fumbled with the keys, his night vision useless for the moment. He managed to open the back of the Explorer and they put the weapons and equipment away.

  Marcus spoke quietly: “Someone’s in a hurry.”

  Alex stopped moving and could hear rapid footfalls coming their way.

  “Damn, I thought we’d manage to sneak out of here. I can deal with the report tomorrow.”

  “No such luck, apparently.”

  A uniformed officer came running out of the night. “You Detective Scaevola?”

  Marcus answered.

  Alex looked at Marcus. “Don’t tell me Zorzi’s gonna have the balls to make us write this up now?”

  “You guys are Nocturn Affairs, right?”

  Marcus gave him a look.

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Anyway, you’re gonna have to come with me. We may have found where she came from.”

  “You know, the dirty work’s done. No nocturns involved. Get Homicide to look at it.”

  “The lieutenant back there asked for you guys specifically. I guess it’s bad. She’s holding t
he crime scene unit back until you two can get in there.”

  “Constance got here fast.”

  Marcus glanced at his watch. “It’s later than you think, Alex.”

  Alex closed and locked up the rear of the Explorer. “After you.”

  They quickly reached the hunter truck’s location. Already, the scene looked different. The medical examiner’s people were present and there was a hive of activity on the sidewalk. They were putting the two bodies next to the van into body bags.

  The folks from the crime scene unit were scouring the front of the building and the area around the van with large flashlights and taking photographs of the evidence. Not much of a mystery here. This one looked open and shut. Alex wondered why Constance needed them there.

  One of the crime scene techs saw them. “Zorzi’s already inside.” He pointed to the building.

  Alex nodded and he and Marcus walked toward the building. They walked up the front stairs and into the small lobby, being careful not to disturb any evidence. It was fairly standard government-built low-income housing dating from around the late 1930s or so. From the looks of things, not much had been done since then.

  There were streaks of blood and one nearly perfect bloody paw print on the gray and white linoleum. It looked very small in the yellow-tinted light.

  Alex stepped back and let Marcus proceed first. Marcus sniffed the air.

  “It smells like there has not been anyone upstairs for months. Everything is coming from over there.”

  They moved through the door Marcus had indicated. They looked to the right and left. Long hallways stretched to either end, lit every few feet by bare bulbs that were less than effective. The walls had been painted and repainted, the layers cracked and peeling to reveal the colors of the years beneath. Combined with the gray cloud-patterned linoleum on the floor, it completed the image of putrefaction and decay.

  Alex had been inside the tenements and other low-cost housing projects before. Those buildings had vibrancy about them, stories they could tell about the tenants who lived there. Alex didn’t need Marcus to tell him this building was dead. Its soul had long gone.

  They saw Stephanie Garza crouched against one wall with her head between her knees. Behind her a cracked backlit sign marked STAIRS with a little stair icon flickered with the telltale indications of a fluorescent light about to give up the ghost.

  “They down there?” Alex asked, reaching into his jacket pocket for some latex gloves. He handed a set to Marcus.

  Stephanie looked up at them and they could see how pale she was. Her eyes took a moment to focus on Alex. She nodded. Alex could see she was barely holding back her gorge.

  “First time on one of these?”

  “I’ve seen my share of homicides but … but nothing like this.”

  “Yeah, a thrope attack is a whole other ball game.”

  “Are they always like this?”

  “Welcome to the jungle, kid.”

  Marcus grabbed the steel handle on the door and yanked it open. A variety of smells assaulted them; blood and decay, stale urine and feces, ammonia and other chemical smells. It was almost enough to make Alex’s eyes water. Even Marcus blanched. Stephanie Garza ran for the front door. She didn’t make it. They heard her heaving in the lobby.

  Alex held his hand over his nose and mouth and started down the stairs. As his eyes adjusted to the even dimmer lighting in the stairwell, he could make out a dark wet lump on the landing. A severed arm still clutched a submachine gun. It was so badly clawed and chewed that it took his mind a moment to know exactly what he was looking at.

  “We think this guy was a guard,” Zorzi shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

  Alex and Marcus walked gingerly past the body, careful not to disturb anything. Zorzi was at the bottom holding open the door to the lower level.

  “I must tell you, Marcus, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even before…”

  Every muscle Alex had tensed. He and Marcus had seen, and done, some unspeakable things in UMBRA. He inwardly prayed that Zorzi had been more sheltered than they had been. Besides, the aftermath of a thrope attack was always bad. Alex braced himself.

  They stepped into the lower hallway. Alex could see several bodies. There was a shotgun, the barrel just slightly curved, lying like a broken, discarded toy roughly twenty feet down the hall. A savaged body lay near the stairwell door. Its rib cage was cracked open and its chest cavity nearly empty, the contents strewn about on the floor nearby. A bloody streak and a trail of internal organs on the nearby wall told of the horrendous claw swipe that had gutted the man.

  Marcus gave the body a cursory glance and moved on. His shoes splashed lightly in the thin pool of congealing blood.

  “Oh shit. Zorzi, I owe the new kid an apology.”

  Two metal chairs with plastic seats lay overturned in the hall; spent shotgun shell casings and a crude porn magazine covered in sticky blood added to the picture.

  “He actually got a shot off,” Zorzi said in a bemused tone.

  “Probably just pissed her off.”

  A third body lay in the entrance to a larger room. It might have been a utility room or a gymnasium in the past, but someone had converted it to something else, judging from the massive door that lay on the ground. Without moving into the room, they could see the nearly decapitated third body.

  “Would you get a load of this door?”

  “Constance is inside. You should go in first.” Zorzi motioned to Marcus.

  This was the standard procedure. Zorzi would tell them very little so that they could form their own ideas of what had occurred without tainting their outlook. He would follow Marcus so as not to contaminate or mask any scent Marcus might pick up. Honestly, with the reek of this place, he doubted that Marcus would be able to smell anything helpful.

  Marcus walked into the room. Alex paused for a moment and stared at the door lying dented and bent on the floor. The door was about three inches thick, painted a dull gray, and looked to be made of steel. Alex could see where claws had gouged deep marks into the metal.

  “Where the hell would someone even get a door like this?” he said aloud. Zorzi shrugged.

  He stopped briefly to look at the twisted hinges and did a mental calculation of how much force it would have taken to twist the hinges in their moorings and pull them wholesale from their anchors in the concrete. Anyone who still debated the preternatural power of a thrope would have lost this argument categorically. Exhibit A, Your Honor, if it pleases the court …

  Marcus called him from inside. “Alex, get in here.”

  He stepped past the nearly decapitated corpse and took in the room at a glance—the splintered remains of a large wooden chair, discolored leather fastenings instantly betraying its purpose, the yellow-tiled floor that sloped down to inset drains, the wide stainless-steel counter with the sink at the end. He saw the overturned tool cart, a punctured car battery seeping fluid, a bone saw, and knives. There were two other corpses, one so badly mutilated it was simply a red and grizzled mass of flesh; only the shoes, elegant and expensive, hinted that it had once been a man.

  His eyes stopped on the three wire-mesh cages lined up in the corner of the room. If it hadn’t been for the chair, he could almost fool himself into thinking that this entire setup was for animals. He stared at the straw-covered floors of those cages, empty water bottles strewn along the bottom of two of them. He saw a stained set of blue jeans tossed to one side.

  “Must you bathe in that cologne?” Constance’s cultured New England tone bounced across the room at him. Alex was astounded that she could pick out that smell among all these others, and more so that it was the smell of his cologne that was causing offense. Then he saw her, her nose slightly wrinkled at his scent, her tongue subconsciously running across her fangs. Her eyes were glazed and bloodshot. Not as if she had just fed. But as if she was about to blood-frenzy. She had her fists balled up at her sides.

  Lieutenant Constance Howe was a stunn
ing nocturn, or rather, she could have been. Her stereotypical pale skin contrasted beautifully with her black hair, giving her an effortlessly classy Gothic look. She had a figure most women would kill for but covered it with long sleeves and high collars. She had the look of a nun. Not the kind that take up the cloth to love God; the kind that hide behind the habit because they can’t bear the guilt of the myriad sins they are trying to atone for. In her dark past, her appeal had encouraged men and women to throw away caution and, with it, their lives.

  Right now, she looked terrible.

  Alex’s eyes flickered over to Marcus. Marcus looked back at him and he knew they were on the same page. Marcus kept making a show as if he were just investigating the scene, but he was positioning himself behind Constance in case she decided to make a move.

  Constance shivered as if she had a chill running up her spine.

  “Are you feeling all right? You look a little peaked.” That was a massive understatement. She looked terrifying, like she was about to cut loose.

  “I’m fine,” came her answer, the words pronounced a little too slowly for Alex’s taste.

  “Yeah? If I were someone else, I’d be crapping my pants about now. You look like you’re about to blood-frenzy.”

  “I’m not.” Again the slow speech, the last consonant enunciated so loudly it sent a little echo bouncing around the room. She spoke again, this time to Marcus. “Don’t think I don’t know what you two are trying to do. I’m in control.”

  She said it again, trying to convince herself. “I’m in control.”

  Zorzi came in and looked around. “So, what do you gentlemen think?” Then he saw Constance. “Oh.”

  She snapped her head at him and shouted, “I’m in control!”

  “Okay, no one is saying otherwise. Take whatever time you need,” Alex said.

  Now Alex could see blood tears coming from her eyes. She really was trying to fight it off. All the blood and gore in the room, it could set off a hunger response in a vampire. It would be the same thing as asking a hungry man to keep his mouth from watering when walking him into the kitchen of a restaurant. Alex had seen it happen before, though not like this, and only to younger vampires. This was different. It was as if Constance had been starving, not merely hungry. Now he looked at Marcus again for reassurance but his eyes were taking on the same blood-crazed look, and his fangs were descending.