Immortal (37 page)

   
As he told it, sometime around his first century, the villagers of a small Latvian hamlet figured out what he was and decided to do something about it. So one afternoon they sealed up the crypt where he was spending his daylight hours. Without elaborating on why they did this—he wasn’t bothering anybody and had restricted his nightly drinking mainly to livestock—he pointed out that this is just about the stupidest thing you can possibly do to a vampire, because they don’t starve to death like people. They just get hungrier.

Hang out with a vampire who drinks a small allotment of blood two or three times a week and you’ll swear there’s hardly any difference between him and your average human. But one who hasn’t drunk in two or three weeks isn’t the best company around. The hungry ones tend to fixate on your neck a lot, which can be very uncomfortable, and it becomes obvious somewhat quickly that they aren’t listening to what you’re saying because they’re too preoccupied listening to your heart pumping. It’s like conversing with somebody who’s wearing a Walkman, only much more disturbing.

According to Bordick, anything longer than thirty days is utter agony. Two months and this constant pain spawns dementia. Longer than that and you’ve got a vampire who is, mentally, entirely too far gone to listen to any sort of reason whatsoever. So after a full calendar year sealed up in that crypt, Bordick was utterly out of his mind.

He couldn’t tell me how the crypt was reopened because he has no memory of it. His brain had stopped processing cogent thoughts. And his mind didn’t return to him until he woke up two nights later in a pile of bodies. Bordick had slaughtered the entire town. Over five hundred men, women and children, he claimed. It may have been an exaggeration, but the number of people wasn’t the point. The point was, never try to kill a vampire by cutting off its food supply, unless your goal is to create an indiscriminate, nearly unstoppable killing machine.

*
 
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*

Standing motionless against the side of the laboratory building and staring at the creature huddled in the darkness fifty feet away, Bordick’s story is the first thing that springs to mind. I can hear small explosions as the empty plastic methanol and ethanol jugs detonate in the heat inside the lab. With the oxygen feeding the inferno, standing this close is going to ultimately prove to be a bad idea. But moving anywhere else doesn’t seem like such a hot prospect either.

“Should we shoot it?” Clara whispers.

“That didn’t seem to make a difference with the security guards,” I point out.

“Then what do you suggest?”

“I’m fresh out of life-sparing ideas at the moment. You?”

The vampire is difficult to make out. Pale skin, definitely. And it looks to be female. A thick mane of hair covers most of its face and part of what seems to be a naked body. The only sounds it makes—it doesn’t breathe, obviously—is a sort of puckering, slurpy noise.

Having seen only a small portion of the compound, I wonder how many lives the vampire has claimed in the past hour. I also wonder why it’s still here. Surely it could have gotten past the fences if it wanted to. Perhaps, despite being almost entirely out of its mind, vengeance is still a primary motivational factor. Well, and feeding. There aren’t any people outside of the fence to feed upon.

All this is fairly moot speculation, as I’m surely about to have my throat ripped out by it.

“Maybe it doesn’t see us,” Clara offers.

“It sees us. I think the problem is we haven’t attacked or tried to run away. We’ve confused it.”

“Well, we’re gonna have to move soon. Those oxygen tanks’ll be exploding any minute now, and I don’t want to be too close to the building when that happens.”

“Neither do I.”

We both hear the front door to the lab slam shut. Viktor.

The vampire hears it, too.

“Viktor!” I shout. “Don’t move!”

Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t care to listen. I spot him about halfway to the administrative building running as fast as an eighty year old geneticist can run. Meaning, not so fast. And not even close to how fast the vampire can go.

I’ve never seen any creature move so quickly. The vampire catches up with Viktor in about three seconds from what has to be at least thirty yards away. For my part, I raise my gun to shoot at it, but don’t have enough time or enough of a target to make it worth the effort to try a shot. Then there’s the matter of whether or not a bullet would do any good. Vampires have thinner hides than demons, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered one this old. Seeing it move I’m wondering if it might actually be older than three centuries.

Catching him from behind, the vampire breaks Viktor’s neck with one swift jerk and buries its face into the side of his neck. It is a magnificent and terrible thing to behold. It’s also a golden opportunity to run to the nearest building and get some cover before it can come after us, but I’m so dumbfounded by the sheer violence of it all that I can’t seem to move.

Clara’s not so transfixed. “Come on!” she urges, jerking at my sleeve.

With her in the lead, we sprint to the door of the nearest building—an inner perimeter barracks house that is not, to the best of my knowledge, in use. Clara tries the door and finds it to be locked. I pull her around the side of the building and out of the light.

“We make for the admin building,” I say.

“Past the vampire?” she exclaims.

“Look at it,” I say, thumbing around the corner of the building. “The door’s unlocked.”

Thanks to the light directly over the front of the door to the administrative building, one can clearly see the door has been left slightly ajar. Clara peeks around the corner and confirms this.

“So? She’ll still catch us before we ever get there.”

A decent point. Especially since the space between us and that door is probably the best-lit area in the entire base and the vampire is right in the middle of it. The direct route would take us right past her.

“We can cut around,” I suggest. “Avoid the compound.”

“Worth a try, I guess.”

Right then, the tanks in the lab go up. The detonation is not quite tremendous enough to blow open any of the walls—it’s one of the few made of bricks, as apparently, when the army built it they took the story of the three little pigs to heart—but it does make the ground shake dramatically enough to knock both of us over.

I get back to my feet and help Clara up.

“This seems like a good time to run,” I say.

After rounding the first corner of the barracks building we take off in a dead sprint for the edge of the second barracks—the building where the scientists sleep—with me leading, but Clara in position to pass me. Impending death makes one run faster. I think that’s probably why they fire a gun before track meets.

I turn the next corner, which puts us on a beeline for the front door of the administrative building.

Or it would have, had I not tripped. I look back to see what I’d caught my leg on. Face down, in pajamas and looking extremely deceased, is one of Viktor’s teammates.

“He must have come out the window,” Clara says. Indeed, the window to the barracks has been broken out. I peer inside.

I can’t say I ever got a chance to really know all of the scientists that were a part of Viktor’s group during my stay. But they were always fairly polite and generally decent toward me, and I imagine if this were a different world and all of us ended up walking away and I ran into one of them sometime later in a bar or something, I would not have a problem sharing a drink with them. So I feel sort of sad, looking in through the shattered window and seeing the carnage inside. I don’t think any of them deserved to be murdered. Certainly most of them didn’t.

“It went in after them,” Clara whispers.

“No time to worry about that now,” I say. “We have to get out of the open.”

“Why?” she asks. “It doesn’t look like buildings pose much of a—”

She stops, staring over my shoulder. I turn around.

The vampire is between us and the open door of the admin building. I didn’t think she could suck Viktor dry that quickly.

I position myself between her and Clara, and extend my arms, a little mini-cordon that won’t stop the vampire any more than it would stop a flame thrower. But it looks gallant, and I figure I may as well go out acting gallantly. Behind me, Clara’s muttering the Lord’s Prayer.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” I say to the vampire.

She stands up from her crouch and takes two hesitant steps toward us.

“Get out of the way and I’ll shoot it,” Clara mutters.

“No,” I say. “Look.”

“Look at what?”

“She’s not attacking.”

Indeed, the vampire has stopped moving and is tilting her head and looking at us with a curiosity that seems absent any real malevolence. We’re being studied.

“Are you doing this?” Clara asks.

“I’m not doing anything. She just doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Why not?”

“Try not to sound offended.”

A noise in another part of the base somewhere, well beyond my range of hearing, but clearly not beyond the vampire’s, takes her attention away from us. Then she leaps twenty feet nearly straight up and lands on the roof of the barracks. In another second she’s out of sight.

“I think I peed my pants,” Clara says. “Why’d she do that?”

“I wish I knew,” I say. “But I’m not about to complain.”

“Let’s get one of the cars and get out of here before she changes her mind.”

“Not yet,” I say. “We still have to destroy the data on the server.”

*
 
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*

The front door to the admin building is covered by a large wood awning with a rounded top, which distinguishes it from every other building in the place insofar as whoever designed it gave a damn about basic aesthetics. I’m guessing, based on the distribution of the windows and the apparent usage of several of the rooms, that unlike the lab, the inside was left more or less intact after it was purchased by Bob Grindel’s group. As I said, Bob tended to enjoy watching me from his picture window above that awning when I was taken to the lab in the morning. He always had this pose—feet apart, hands on hips—that gave off a certain “I am the king of all I survey” attitude that made me want to kill him. I never quite got over that.

So it was with mixed pleasure that I had learned from Clara that not only is the main computer storage in the admin building, there’s a possibility Bob has made a copy of it in his office. Trying to destroy the computers, and retrieve the disks from Bob, vastly increases the likelihood that I will not survive the evening, but on the bright side, it provides me with an excellent opportunity to kill him. Provided the vampire hasn’t caught up to him yet.

“Do you know where the computer-whatever is?” I ask Clara as soon as we’re inside.

“The tower? I think so. There’s a locked room down the hall. I’ve never been in it, but I felt the door once, and it was cool.”

“In a slang sense?” I ask, confused.

“Air conditioning.”

“Um, okay. Can you get into the room on your own?”

“With the key. Where are you going?”

“Upstairs. To check for copies.”

She looks at me archly. “You don’t even know what a zip disk looks like.”

“I’m a quick learner.”

She holds out her hand and I give up the key ring. “He’s already left the base,” she says. “You know that, right? He probably went straight for his helicopter as soon as I wounded him.”

“Probably,” I agree. “Can’t hurt to check.”

I get a frown from her. “Back at the apartment, when I was trying to convince you to come here, it was just so I could follow. You don’t actually have to exact revenge, or whatever it is you think you’re doing here.”

“Do you think I’m doing this to impress you?”

“I’m just sorry I called you cowardly is all.”

“Clara, if he’s upstairs and I skipped out without even trying to go after him, I’ll be kicking myself for the next three centuries.”

“Fine,” she shrugs. “I’ll meet you back here in a few. Then maybe we can get the hell out of here already.”

She runs off down the hall while I head up the center staircase that’s directly in front of me.

Clara’s right. As long as the vampire isn’t interested in biting either of us on the neck, there’s no good reason for us not to grab the nearest Humvee and escape while we still can. Which means I’m doing exactly what I told her in New York I wasn’t going to do—acting out solely in the name of vengeance. And, as I’ve said before, that’s nearly always a mistake. But I’d really like to kill Bob, and I’m not looking to be reasonable about it at this point.

I reach the second floor landing, check the gun—still a half-clip left—and slip the vial of chicken pox I took from the lab into my hand. The gun is for Bob, who I’m thinking is no less bulletproof now, than he was an hour ago when Clara winged him. The vial is for Brutus.

The center office is only a few paces from the landing. I sneak up to it and, finding the door ajar, I kick it completely open and spin into the room firing. I reasoned, perhaps stupidly, that if Bob was anywhere he’d be at his desk and that his desk just had to be near the picture window. Completely wrong, naturally. The only thing the bullets hit is the window, which manages to crack spectacularly in several places.

A heavy hand comes down from the right of the doorway and knocks the gun out of my grasp. Before I have much of a chance to register this, I’m shoved to the floor myself, albeit several feet away from the gun. Brutus is on top of me a second later, one mitt wrapped around my neck.

“Not yet,” says Bob. The lights are out in the room, so the best I can figure is that he’s somewhere to the right of the half-shattered window. Behind the desk. If I were even a bit smart, I would have asked Clara how the office was set up before going and assuming things.

“Pick him up.”

Brutus complies by lifting me by the neck—not real comfortable, that—and pressing me up against the wall.

My eyes adjust and there’s Bob with a very large suitcase open atop the desk. He has a white bandage on his shoulder, which he’s bled through.