Blood Crimes: Book One (29 page)

      
Jim
stood silently trying to quiet the noise in his head so he could identify how many voices were coming from inside the apartment. He counted four. As he stood frozen, concentrating, he detected a familiar scent. Carol’s. She was in there, there was no mistaking it. Everything got so quiet then. He kicked the door in and found himself in an empty room. A Blood Dragon emerged from a connecting room, locked eyes on
Jim
, but before he could get a word out
Jim
fired off two shots, one missing wide, the other taking off a good chunk of the biker’s jaw. The gang member fell back into the room as if he’d been shot out of a cannon.
Jim
raced across the empty room into the one the biker had fallen into. Raze was there with two other Blood Dragons, all of them looking wide-eyed at him, their faces pinched, surprised. One of the bikers leveled a shotgun towards the doorway and pointed it at
Jim
’s chest.
Jim
slowed down when he saw Carol lying on the floor. Her hands and feet were tied, a gag stuffed in her mouth, her eyes yellowish and in pain as they met his. He took a step towards her and was knocked back by a shotgun blast. The biker who shot him was grinning.
Jim
turned on him and the grin quickly faded. Before the biker could get off another shot he was dead,
Jim
’s sword slicing his chest open. Another biker lifted a Glock and fired rounds at
Jim
, who reacted to the bullets the way a man might push through a hail storm. He cut off the biker’s arm. The Glock still gripped within the biker’s dead hand continued to fire after it hit the floor, a half-dozen more rounds strafing the wall before the gun finally came to rest. The biker stared dumbly at his arm while
Jim
cut him in half at the waist. The only biker left was Raze. He was the same person with the fire-scarred face that
Jim
had ripped off in the men’s room the night before.

      “Fuck you,” Raze said. He lifted a small black pistol, probably a 9 mm, and shot Carol in the side. It got so quiet in
Jim
’s head then. Fragments of time blipped away from him. He knew later he had killed Raze; he could see pieces of the biker’s body scattered across the room, but he couldn’t remember doing it. All he knew was that he was by Carol’s side; that the rag had been taken out of her mouth and the ropes tying her feet and hands had been cut away. He was holding her, trying to soothe her, whispering to her how much he loved her, but he couldn’t do anything to help her. Life was fading quickly from her.

      “Don’t let me die,” she begged, her voice asthmatic, not much more than a whisper.

      His head was swimming. He tried to think of something to say to her, but there was nothing. She coughed weakly. Blood leaked from the corner of her mouth.

      “Please, don’t let me leave you,” she forced out between ragged breaths. “Save me.”

      “I can’t. Not that. Not to you.”

      “Please…”

      There wasn’t much left of her. He tried to kiss her lips, but she turned away to show him her throat. She pleaded again for him to save her. A heaviness sunk into his chest. He tried to explain why he couldn’t inflict that type of misery on her. That he loved her too much. She couldn’t talk anymore. Her voice was gone, but there was so much disappointment in her eyes. They told him that he had failed her.

      From behind he heard someone applauding, then a woman’s soft lyrical voice saying, “Bravo.” He turned dumbly to see Serena. Next to her were two other vampires, both of whom seemed familiar, but his brain just wasn’t working. Serena stopped applauding so she could talk to the other vampires. He heard what she was saying, but her words didn’t register on him, nothing did.

      They started moving towards him, and the way they were smiling at Carol he finally realized what they were planning to do to her.

      The world slipped away from him. He had a vague image of himself flying at the shorter vampire, the one who held his sword as if he knew how to use it, then all that confidence draining out of the vampire’s eyes as he saw
Jim
pointing his .45 at his face, the vampire mouthing the word “fuck” just before
Jim
squeezed off three quick rounds, then swinging his sword low and slicing off the vampire’s feet and leaving him toppling to the floor.

      The world came back. He recognized the vampire who was trying to get to Carol. Wilfred, one of Serena’s prized pets from the old days.
Jim
swung his sword at the vampire’s head. Wilfred dodged it but it forced him to move away from Carol.
Jim
raised his sword for another blow and was hit hard from behind. Claws raked his face, legs wrapped around him trying to break his ribcage. It was Serena. She had jumped on his back and the force of it sent him off balance and falling against a glass window. The glass broke. Before he fell through it he twisted his body and saw another familiar vampire standing in the room’s doorway. He was bigger than the others, harder looking, and as
Jim
crashed through the window he recognized
M
etcalf.

      Then
Jim
and Serena were hurtling through the air. As they fell, she kept clawing at his eyes, her legs squeezing tighter.
Jim
twisted his body until she was underneath him. He saw the iron gate before they hit. The impact was jarring. Serena let go of him and he bounced onto the concrete sidewalk. He got to his feet, dazed, wondering why Serena appeared balanced on top of the gate. Then he realized one of daggers had impaled her and had sunk several inches into her body. She was stuck, there was nothing for her to use as leverage to free herself.

      “
Jim
,” she said, gasping, trying hard not to show her pain. “Please, darling get me off of this and we’re even.”

      
Jim
looked underneath her and saw where the dagger was sticking in. He couldn’t help smiling. He grabbed her and pulled her down, impaling her deeper until the dagger pushed through her chest. Even without the noises she made, he knew it went through her heart. He left her like that and headed back into the apartment building, racing up the seven flights of stairs and into Raze’s apartment.
M
etcalf was gone, as was Wilfred and the vampire whose feet he had cut off. So was Carol. The only bodies left in the apartment were the dead members of the Blood Dragons.

      
Jim
stood staring blankly at where he had left Carol. A small puddle of her blood had pooled on the hardwood floor. He tried to tell himself that she was dead, that
M
etcalf didn’t have the time to infect her, and that taking her body was nothing more than a ploy on
M
etcalf’s part to make
Jim
search for him—to make him think that there was a chance that
M
etcalf would turn Carol into one of his experiments. She had to be dead. He had to just think that, but the other thought nagged at him, sickened him.

      The sound of sirens brought him back to the present. He looked out the window and saw waves of police cars descending on the building. It made sense that so many would come after the gunshots that were fired and everything else that had happened in Cleveland that day. He looked straight down. Serena was still impaled on the gate post below, still flapping about like a fish out of water. He left the bedroom and climbed out a window from the adjoining room. He scaled down the side of the building so he could leave unseen by the police.

      
M
etcalf was bluffing. He knew that. Carol’s life was slipping away so fast before. Still, as long as there was any chance that
M
etcalf had her, he had no choice about what he was going to do. He was going to have to chase after
M
etcalf.

      Police lights strobed red and blue against the neighboring buildings. He heard police officers coming his way to check the grounds.
Jim
ran then, first sprinting across the back lot of the neighboring building, then disappearing into the night. 
 

Epilogue
 

      Pearce broke out of a feverish dream. He stared up at the ceiling blinking wildly, disoriented, with no clue where he was. God he ached, god he was hungry. It was weird when he blinked, like only one eye was working, and fuck, his face felt funny. He touched the eye that didn’t seem to be working and felt only bone. It didn’t surprise him. His fingers moved down his face and he touched ragged skin and more exposed bone. Yeah, half his face was chewed up. So what? Somehow he knew it no longer mattered. He looked at his right hand and saw he was missing two fingers. Again, so what?

      Fuck, was he hungry.
M
ust be why he was moaning so loudly. Except the noise wasn’t coming from him. He pushed himself up onto an elbow. The room was mostly dark. A single fluorescent light flickered overhead, but it gave off enough light for him to see that there were two other guys in the room with him. One was much bigger than the other. He didn’t recognize either of them, but they both looked out of it the way they moaned and squirmed around on the floor. As Pearce watched them he found himself salivating. He crawled over to the bigger one and sunk his teeth into the guy’s neck. It was reflex, he didn’t even realize he was doing it until he was sucking up the guy’s blood. Then he was crawling off of him, retching, wave after wave of nausea rolling over him. He thought he was going to die, but after a while the intense agony subsided and he could breathe again. A lesson to be learned from that. These two he had to keep away from, but at some level he knew he needed to drink human blood. That that would be the only thing that would satisfy his hunger.

      He remembered then about that weird skinny-assed freakshow guy from the other day—the one who robbed Raze, and later tore Zeke and Ash apart like they were cloth dolls. Pearce sat scratching his head, trying to make sense of it, and then he started laughing. Because he understood. He knew what he had become.

      He staggered to his feet. Jesus, he had never been so damn hungry. He looked around, blinking, his remaining eye acclimating to the semi-darkness, and realized he was in a windowless basement. He made his way up a staircase, opened the door, and screamed like a baby when the sunlight hit him. Dropping to his knees, he crawled back down the staircase and away from the light. Fuck, it was like someone had tossed acid in his face. After a minute or so the pain went away. He understood then he’d have to wait until it was dark before he’d be able to satisfy his hunger. But smacking his lips he knew he’d eat well then. For the hell of it he decided to test out whether he had the same freakish strength that that other dude had. He punched the concrete wall and his fist cracked through it. He smiled at that. Yeah, fuck, he was going to eat well later. After the sun went down.

      As it was he was hungry enough to eat a cow, or given his present condition, drain the blood out of a nice-looking broad.
M
ake that a busload of them. Or a club full of strippers. Yeah, he was going to eat well later. No doubt.

###

The story continues in Blood Crimes: Book Two.

Bonus Section
 

      Bonus section includes: ‘
M
ore Than a Scam’ from 21 Tales, first chapter from Fast Lane, first chapter from Bad Thoughts, first section from the Shamus-award winning novella ‘Julius Katz’, first chapter from The Walk by Lee Goldberg and the prologue and first chapter from Dead and Gone by Harry Shannon.. 

M
ore Than a Scam (from 21 Tales)
 

The inspiration for this story were the ubiquitous Nigerian email scam letters I was receiving daily. At first I was planning to do the same as my story’s hero, namely record a correspondence with one of these scam artists, but instead I decided to go in another direction.
M
ore Than a Scam received honorable in the 2003 edition of Best American
M
ystery Stories
. 

      It really all started with the email I received. The message was marked “Urgent/Confidential” and was from one Celestine Okiti, who claimed to be a senior accountant with the Nigerian Federal
M
inistry of Finance. The gist of the email was that ten and a half million dollars was sitting in a Nigerian bank account and she was looking for a partner to pose as the next of kin of some dead foreign contractor so she could get the money out – and that my cut would be four and a half million dollars, minus expenses.

      Of course it was a scam. It was too silly to be anything else, and besides I had read about this years ago. The “pigeon” who went for his four and a half million cut would be asked to put up some money to show good faith and to cover the expenses. It was a pretty simple and childish scam, one that makes you wonder how anyone in the world could fall for it, but still, I was fascinated by that email. It got my mind spinning on different crime story scenarios.