Blood Work (4 page)

Eyes blinded
by the sudden brightness, I nearly missed the second, and worse
thing. Even as I caught a glimpse of it flying at me from the top
of the burning wall, I remembered the third vampire I’d sensed.

Left arm
tangled up in my jacket, I tried to twist out of the vampire’s way.
I wasn’t fast enough, catching the ballistic creature on my right
side. Impact lifted me off the ground, threw me into a wall. It was
a movable one, fastened in place with only a couple of bolts. My
weight and that of the vampire broke the base of it and we all went
arse over tit into the next corridor.

I came up wet,
sore, bleeding and incredibly angry.

A veil of red
dropped across my vision and everything suddenly felt hot. My skin
burned and the air in my lungs churned. The gun had been knocked
out of my hand, but I didn’t much care at that stage. Bellowing
what I would later hope was a decent, sphincter-weakening war-cry,
I lunged for the vampire.

He was fast,
faster than me, but berserk rage fuelled my limbs and I was on him
before I could think. There was a roaring in my head, a pressure
that needed to be vented and the only way I knew how to do that was
to hurt something. Lucky me. I had
something
right in front
of me.

It degenerated
into a blur of fists and fangs and spraying blood, some of it
watery—the vampire’s—some of it not—mine. I’m pretty sure the
slow-mo replay would reveal nothing elegant or even stylised about
it. It was dirty, mean and primitive; two savage animals in a fight
to the death. The water from the sprinklers hindered both of us,
made us slippery and hard to hold. Mixing in smears of blood didn’t
help. I had him at one point, one arm locked around his shoulders,
my other fist pounding relentlessly into his already pulpy face. My
knuckles were bleeding freely, smashed raw on his hard jaw, ripped
open by his sharp teeth. Then the bastard managed to wriggle out of
my hold.

He shoved me
into a wall, again. This one wasn’t temporary. It was hard. Brick
under a coating of thin plywood. The back of my head hit with a
dull thud and for a moment, the red haze burned bright white. Then
he was on me, pinning my arms to my sides. His head reared back,
ready to slam his forehead into my face. I pulled to the side,
caught his blow on my shoulder. It flared with an intense pain I
was going to feel later, if I even had a later, that was.

I was trapped,
held tight to the wall, and now that he had a hold on me, his
superior strength became a benefit. Didn’t mean I had to give in. I
kicked and thrashed and howled, the berserker inside me let
completely loose. But then I felt something that froze me for a
split second.

Two sharp
points against my neck.

He was trying
to bite me. No fucking way.

I’d been
trapped like this before. The vampire had fed on me that time, and
I’d vowed never again.

Just what I
could have done is beyond me. Thankfully, my lack of coherent
thinking didn’t kill me.

A dark blur
flashed in from my right and the vampire was gone. Vanished.

Released from
the pressure of the vampire’s hold, I hit the floor, still trying
to catch up to current events. The only possibility that came to my
anger-addled head was that the vampire had been carried away by
something faster than it. And there was only one thing faster than
an immature vampire in my experience—a mature one.

I spun around,
looking for the vampires, but they were long gone. With the
immediate threat over, the rage inside cooled somewhat. Not
completely, but enough to let a few higher brain functions through
to the front. I had to keep hunting, protect the humans, and to do
that, I needed my weapon.

The Eagle was
under a pile of broken wall, undamaged as far as my quick
inspection went. I fired it to make sure the water hadn’t buggered
it up. A splot of green paint hit the wall and dribbled down
rapidly in the wet.

By feel I
ejected the mag and inserted a new one even as I closed my eyes and
reached
for Mercy. She was fighting a couple of the
vampires, not far away. The remains of the berserker rage still
bubbling through my blood, I headed toward her.

The maze
wasn’t as daunting in the steady, white light and after a half
minute or so, the sprinklers switched off. I turned a corner and
found a pool of post-vampire slaying gloop. Mercy had bagged one.
Around another bend, a bigger splattering of ooze. Two, or maybe
three small ones. Six or seven down. Go team.

Mercy was on
the move, ahead of me and accelerating. The need to hurt something
was lingering in my body like an overdose but there was nothing for
me to take it out on. My partner was obliterating the young
vampires without pause. I raced past three more execution sites in
quick succession, then a familiar sound hauled me up so quick I
nearly got whiplash.

“Help!”

These vampires
weren’t old enough to have mastered much more than crude
vocalisations, certainly no words. It was human.

Twisting
about, I headed down a side-corridor, around another corner and
into a dead end.

Five people
were crowded into the narrow space, pushing back into what had to
be a solid wall because with their weight and desperation, a
movable one would have been kindling by now. They were mostly kids,
like the first girl, dressed for a game of laser-tag. In front,
protecting them, was a man probably around my age, narrow across
the shoulders, slightly saggy around the waist, part Aboriginal by
the shade of his skin and shape of his nose. He wore a shirt with a
rudely fluorescent logo, ‘Surf Wars!’. The game attendant.

Between him
and me, a vampire.

She was lean,
with the broad shoulders, narrow hips and long, long legs of a
swimmer. Sun-bleached hair kept short was a shaggy mess around her
face. A couple of weeks ago, when she was still human, she would
have been tanned. Now, she was a sickly shade of brownish-yellow,
heading for the white of a creature of the night. She, too, had
learned tonight just what she was now. There was blood smeared
around her mouth, streaking her hands and splattered across a
T-shirt proclaiming ‘In case of emergency, Break Dance!’.

The vampire
hesitated. This was probably the first time in her new life she’d
been faced with a decision. I could see her trying to do a threat
assessment on the situation. Five bags of food versus one with a
really angry expression. Which to choose.

I was hyped up
on just enough couldn’t-give-a-fuck to throw caution to the wind.
In the split second it took her to pick me, I was on her. One arm
wrapped around her shoulders, I pushed the barrel of the Eagle
right into her ear and squeezed the trigger.

Let me say
this and then we’ll leave it alone.

It wasn’t
pretty.

Covered in
vampire remains, I picked myself up off the slippery floor and
faced five very stunned people.

“Gas leak,” I
said. “You’re all hallucinating.”

They kept
staring, and the attendant guy gathered the kids behind him more
securely.

With a
clatter, the empty mag hit the floor and I fished the last full one
out of my pocket. “You know the way through the maze?” I asked
Attendant Guy.

He nodded,
fast and worried.

“Go back to
the start. You’ll find a guy in a suit and one of the other kids
there. Stay with him.”

Another nod,
but no movement. Apparently, I was as scary as a vampire. Yay
me.

I backed out
of the dead-end, giving them room to ease past me.

Ushering the
kids back the way I’d come, Attendant Guy paused. “There’s another
kid in here somewhere.”

“Yeah, I know.
You just get those ones out. And thanks for coming in after
them.”

He turned to
leave, then stopped again. “Thanks for coming in after me.” Then he
was gone, herding his frightened, bloodied charges toward
safety.

Once more
alone, I took a moment to get a sense on the last kid. And, as it
turned out, the last vampire. There was one more still alive, very
close to the human. Further afield, Mercy was coming in at speed. I
was closer, but she was faster.

When I came
around the last corner, the first thing I saw was the boy. Maybe
fourteen if he was a day, lying face down on the floor. Leaning
over him was a vampire.

Petite, sweet
bodied and adorable with curls of black hair that reached her
shoulders and surrounded a heart-shaped face. Her skin was
flawless, moonlight cast in soft, silky textures. Blood-red lips
peeled back from perfect white teeth, two of which were
terrifyingly long, pointed canines. Her eyes were the reflective
silver of a hunting predator.

About to take
a gigantic bite out of the boy, the dark-haired huntress sensed my
presence. Her head snapped up and her alien gaze pinned me. The
wash of her psychic powers rolled over me in a great, swamping
rush. It snapped into my limbs whip-crack fast, trying to paralyse
me.

This was no
immature vampire; not some half-arsed monster who didn’t know what
to do with all its strength and skills. She was everything the mob
of fledgling vampires had wanted to be but never would be now.
Everything about her spoke of power and dominance and deadliness.
Her psychic whammy was perfectly aimed to take me out.

And you know,
I would have been toast if I didn’t have a psychic link to her.

I jerked that
link like a dog trainer on the business end of a choker chain. It
broke Mercy’s concentration, pulled the power she directed at me
back through her and along the link. Reversed, the psychic whammy
slammed into her.

The sudden
backwash of power knocked her off her feet. She slammed against a
wall. Being a temporary one, it broke and she disappeared into the
next corridor in a shower of dust and splinters.

Score one to
me.

With a bit of
breathing room, I looked around and found a puddle of vampire goo.
Mercy had finished it off before I even got here.

Kneeling by
the kid, I checked his pulse. Strong and steady, just dazed. I
lifted him into my arms and turned to find Mercy picking her way
out of the rubble with delicate steps, brushing down her black
T-shirt and jeans as she went. Her eyes were their normal
dark-brown colour.

She looked up
at me with a serious pout. “You tore my shirt.”

I swear the
rip was tiny and a few seconds with a needle and thread, good as
new, but to look at her devastated expression, you’d think I’d
drawn a goatee on the Mona Lisa.

“Really?
That’s what you’re leading with? How about sorry for trying to
whammy me?”

A flash of
silver across her eyes, then just plain brown as she ducked her
head. “Sorry.”

I could’ve
almost felt sorry for her, but didn’t. As enticingly woman-shaped
as she was, she wasn’t human. She did a bang up job at pretending
but that was as far as it went. Her words sounded repentant, yet
they weren’t. It was a learned response, like everything else she
did.

Still, it was
the response I expected, so I relented. “Good job, kiddo. You
cleaned this mob up like a pro.”

Face still
downcast, I barely saw the smile quirk her lips up. “It was
easy.”

Adjusting the
boy, who was starting to squirm, I said, “Let’s go find Roberts.
Then we have to think of how much we’re going to charge Barry for
trashing his joint.”

Mercy nodded
and trooped alongside me, tiny and cute and just moments away from
having been a mindless, raging killer. I’d be lying if I said the
image of her leaning over this kid sat easy with me. Again,
Roberts’ words about trusting her came back to me, but I pushed
them away forcefully. All in all, for her first time out on her
own, she’d done really well, and maybe she’d just been going to
check the boy’s pulse...

With those
sobering thoughts, the last of the berserker rage left me. I came
down off the violence-high and all the injuries I’d suffered
crashed in all at once. My shoulder throbbed, my jaw ached,
lightning shot through my left knee—never fully recovered from
being shattered several years before—and my hands, raw from
smashing that vampire’s face, spasmed and went numb.

Uh oh.

Vampire blood
was a nasty cocktail of toxins and sedatives, as was their saliva.
In large enough amounts, either was enough to knock out a human
cold. Along with their psychic blow, it’s how they keep their food
compliant. The open cuts and abrasions on my fists weren’t too bad,
but now that the adrenaline was fading, the toxins were having
their carefree way with my body.

“Mercy,” I
managed as my legs began to buckle. “Take the...”

And I was
gone, falling into darkness and painless oblivion.

Erin put the disk into her computer
and hit play. The screen flickered into life, a grainy, dark
picture swimming into partial focus. Static lines creased the image
and Erin squinted, trying to make out details.

It was a
nightclub, bar to the left of the screen and dance floor in the
upper right corner. She could just make out bodies twisting and
gyrating to music she couldn’t hear. The rest of the room was
crowded with young people in groups or pairs, drinks in hand while
they laughed and yelled over the general noise. The girls wore a
wild range of small clothes and big shoes while the boys were, for
the most part, various shades of the same T-shirt and jeans
uniform. Altogether, they were just a silent pantomime about the
excesses of youth.

They all
looked incredibly young. Or perhaps that was just how it seemed
from Erin’s perspective. How long would it be before these kids
were slapped in the face by life? Before the fun of a night out
clubbing became nothing more than a wistful memory while the
reality of surviving in a world that didn’t really care tried to
drag you down…