No Rest for the Wicked (21 page)

“We can't break in there,” I told Mitch.

He shook his head, a big smile on his face, and pointed upward. There, above me on the wall, was an old fuse box.

It couldn't be that simple, could it?

But it was. Per Mitch's instructions, I broke the fuses in rapid succession; a crack, snap, and groan issued from the machine room. About half a dozen male voices shouted out in dismay.

A second later a big man came out of the door, an expression of serious consternation on his face, and saw me at the fuse box.

“Hey!”

He charged. From behind the door through which he had just come, Mitch slithered around behind him and into the machine room.

While I grappled with tall, bald, and stinky, confusion continued to reign in the room Mitch had entered. Another bloodsucker emerged in a state of distress and saw me battling his coworker in the hallway, but seemed unconcerned.

“What happened to the emergency backup?” he wailed to the one who came out behind him.

“I told them we needed a UPS box, but they wouldn't purchase one.” He and his companion watched me throw my foe against a wall. “Who's that?”

“Some third-floor thug,” sniffed the first man.

The bloodsucker double-fisted me on the back of the neck and I went down, turning so that when he jumped on top of me, I grabbed him and we rolled down the hallway, past the shined black shoes of the two techs who stood in the doorway watching us.

“Should I call this in?”

“Maybe.”

The thug I battled grabbed my forearm and bit down hard. It was like getting your arm stuck in a bear trap. I screamed and punched his face repeatedly, trying to get him to let go.

The hallway was suddenly filled with the deafening sound of a fire alarm, and flashing lights. I heard thundering footsteps on the stairs. I jammed my elbow into the vampire's face, and he let go of me.

Mitch came careening out of the door of the machine room. He had a hefty silver box in his hands, his eyes were wild, and his tie was flying as he took off down the hallway. I dropped the Incredible Hulk and ran after Mitch.

We were halfway down the stairs going around the landing, and we came face-to-face with another vampire.

He was cleaner than the others. Trimmer and better dressed. His face was bloody, though, like theirs had been, and he was in full battle face.

Caballo had always had a significantly sexy vampire visage.

“Put the hard drive down,” he said.

I'd once seen a pit bull that had attacked a man. I remembered her bloody muzzle and the blood-tinged slobber on her lips. She was still wearing the collar her owner had put on her. It bore tags and a small pink bone with the name
Mitsy
engraved on it.

“Once they get the taste of human flesh, they have to be put down,” the officer had told me.

Caballo had that look about him. Like the two breeds in his blood had battled, and the stronger, wilder breed had won.

I could hear the thunder of feet above and below us. The alarms. Who knew how long until Mitch and I were overwhelmed with the vampire army? “We can't let them keep this code, Caballo.”

“What
them
? They's
us
, dog. Don't you see that?” His teeth, when he smiled, were bloody.

“You're crazy,” I said.

“You the one's crazy, dog. Playing at being a human. These boys, they got the right idea here.”

I didn't have time to argue. I feinted left, charged right, and yelled “Run!” at Mitch when Caballo jumped to meet me, leaving the passage down the stairs open. It was a needless command; the little geek was already leaping down the stairs four at a time, the hard drive tucked under one arm.

Caballo spun around to give chase, and I grabbed him from behind, holding him back.

Caballo roared and reached behind himself to grasp my head, leaning over and tossing me over his shoulder. But I caught hold of him as I went and brought him down with me. We rolled, clawing at each other, each trying to gain dominance. The alarms were screaming around us, and I was just wondering, in the part of my brain not concerned with holding Caballo down, why no

more soldiers had charged us, when I heard the gunfire starting, the boom and crash of tear gas canisters going through empty windows.

Caballo got me in the vise of his legs and flipped us over so he sat astride me, holding my hands to either side with his, his face inches from mine, victorious and wild. “You've really pissed me off this time, Adam,” he said.

He leaned closer. I could smell the blood on his breath. He shifted as I struggled, and I could feel his hard-on.

“Tell me you want it.”

“Of course I do, puta.” I got one hand twisted around so I could wrap my fingers around his wrist and twist. Bones cracked loudly. He gave in to the pain, and I leaned and bucked, and our positions were reversed.

I could hear the racket around us as the SWAT team invaded the premises. The stench of tear gas was already seeping to us, lacing the stench of the building with an acid burn. It tore at my sinuses. I stopped breathing, but it was in my tear ducts, searing my throat.

Caballo struggled under me. “You're like me, dog,” he said. “Why fight it?”

My eyes were blurred with gas-induced tears. I could now smell smoke as well as the gas.

A canister must have exploded near one of the many piles of trash and started a fire.

“This place is on fire,” I told Caballo, holding him down.

He writhed and bucked and twisted under me. “So?”

“Drew's on the fourth floor.”

He stilled under me. Just like that. He blinked.

“Shit, man.”

I jumped off him, helped him stand, and we raced each other up the stairs.

* * *

My last tour in Afghanistan, there'd been a raid on a village by a trio of Russian Flankers.

The villagers had countered with one antiaircraft gun that had, unfortunately, blasted a jet from the sky too close to the village center.

Afterward there'd been over fifty dead, and I had never been able to clear from my memory the vision of the row of bodies laid out on the ground.

That is what the fourth floor of the building on 124th brought to mind.

It was more an attic than a floor. Slanted, exposed-beam ceilings leaked street light at the place where the eaves met the floor. On either side of a cleared aisle in the middle, bodies lay a foot apart in neat rows.

The smell of death was heavy and inescapable, and the smoke and tear gas seeped up through the cracks in the joists and floorboards like steam escaping from a kettle.

We ran down the aisle, checking each corpse until we found Drew lying about halfway down on his own little pallet. Pale and still. I slid my arms under his shoulders and hips and lifted him. He was as light as a girl, the dark lashes fanned across his pale cheeks.

“They lie to them, you know.” Caballo had a fit of coughing. The smoke in the room was thick enough to taste. “Turn about ten percent, not eighty.”

I looked up and down the aisle of still bodies.

“That's still ten percent,” I said.

“Fuck, dog, why you always making me think about things,” said Caballo. He stooped down and scooped up the woman who lay next to Drew.

We ran down the stairs, deposited our burdens on the concrete far from the building and ran upstairs again. We'd made about five trips. As I lifted my sixth, a tiny woman, from her pallet on the floor, in addition to yells, crashing glass, and the occasional gunshot, I could now hear the sound below of men screaming. Smoke was billowing up through every crack in the floorboards, and the heat was as in an oven.

By the time we got to the bottom, fire hoses were pouring gallons of water against the side of the building. Vampires were pouring from its doors like cockroaches, SWAT personnel hopelessly attempting to intercept them as they fled.

I spotted Peter a few yards away with a couple of uniformed officers, overseeing the transport of bodies to the ME vehicles. “Mitch got the hard drive to Nancy,” he told me. His watched a coroner's assistant zipping a body bag closed. “Are they going to…” He did that movement with his hand.

“Maybe.”

“Drew's in the van,” he said. He looked grim, his skin that oatmeal color, eyes bleak.

I couldn't think about it. “I can't…” I shook my head. Caballo had appeared in the doorway again, carrying another body. He saw me and summoned me with a wide sweep of his arm. “I've got to get the rest of them, Peter.”

He rubbed at the corner of his mouth with his thumb, an action he only performs when he is, rarely, withholding his opinion.

“What?”

“Maybe they'd be better off if you left them,” said Peter.

It was a pivotal moment. Later, I'd think about everything Peter had been through in the past year. What circumstances had pressed him to say that. Later, I'd forgive him.

“Not an option,” I snapped. And ran back to the building.

“Adam!” he called, but I'd joined Caballo at the foot of the stairs. He was above me, those designer sneakers flashing their brightly colored soles as he ran. “I'm one ahead of you, you slow old bitch,” he yelled, working his way around the bloodsuckers and police officers and firemen that crowded the stairwell.

We both jumped over a fire hose as thick as a man's leg and gained the fourth floor landing. The smoke in the room was so dense I could barely see.

Caballo dove right into it, heading toward the back of the attic, his body barely visible in the smoke. He turned and shouted. “There's this hot little number back here. Hate to waste such a fine—” And the house bumped, rocked, a muted thump and explosion and two plus two added up with the bottles I'd seen in the flooded basement and equaled four.

And then the floor beneath Caballo disappeared.

All that was left was a hole with smoke pouring up through it and the roar of fire devouring oxygen below. Within seconds the room was filled with so much smoke I couldn't see.

I held my corpse close against my chest, edged around the open floor to the doorway, and fled down the stairwell.

There were bodies in the stairwell, alive and dead, and a confusion of fear and anger. In the midst of it I saw a frowzy dark head on a diminutive frame. “Betsy!”

She had a young woman over one shoulder and what looked like a boy hefted against her hip.

“Follow me,” I yelled.

I led her across the second landing, down the passage Mitch had showed me, and out into the back lot facing the LA River.

Behind us the building gushed smoke. Sirens announced the arrival of more fire trucks, and I led Betsy to the ME vehicles until we found the one where Drew's body had been stashed.

Neatly zipped up in a black plastic bag.

Betsy crawled up and knelt beside him, sobbing her heart out.

“You sure you don't want to go with him?” asked Peter.

Dawn seemed delayed, but it could have been the smoke. Betsy and Mitch sat in the back of the ice-cream truck with me. Peter frowned in concentration as he stomped on the clutch and jerked gears back and forth.

Drew had been loaded into an ME vehicle with the other dead. I'd had to help wrestle him out of Betsy's hands. I hadn't even told her about Caballo yet. Mostly because I hadn't accepted it myself.

“Drew's got another ten hours or so,” said Mitch. “But I've seen this a bunch of times. I think he might make it.”

I didn't know if I hoped he was right. Or hoped he was wrong.

“To the morgue?”

I answered Peter's question. “No thanks, seen enough of that. He'll call if…when…he needs us.”

He turned so he could study my face. I had to look away.

We arrived at the Empress Parlor in time to see the eastern star rising. Betsy was so prostrate she didn't even object when Peter parked the truck in the underground garage and followed us into the service elevator. We stood there, silent, ash covered, and somber as the elevator shook and heaved and made its way to the top floor. The doors slid open.

Betsy screamed.

The place had been bathed in blood. At the center of it sat Frank, covered with blood and some kind of lumpy gore which, as it turned out, were the entrails of the Red Patrol officer I'd seen earlier that evening. His throat was so shredded you could see the white bones of his spine, and Mitch ran off to the corner to heave.

“I was hungry,” said Frank.

“No,” Betsy wailed. “Oh, Frank!”

Peter's a hardened homicide detective, but even he looked shaken. All around us, in puddles of his own blood, were the copies of Betsy's image the officer had been carrying in his satchel. Betsy knelt next to Frank, hugging him and rocking him and crying.

“We should leave them alone,” I told Peter.

“What? This is a crime scene,” he said. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“Betsy will take care of it,” I told him. “You don't need to call it in.”

He stared at me. “I can't believe you'd say that.”

“What are you going to do? Call SI in here?” I waved my arm toward our row of stainless steel refrigerators. “Explain the bags of blood?”

Betsy had raised Frank to his feet and, still sobbing, was leading him to her back apartments.

“Wait,” said Peter. “Where are you taking him?”

He made to follow, but I put a hand on his chest. He stilled and looked down at my hand.

“You don't want to see it,” I told him.

“See what?” His eyes widened. “No. No, I can't let you do that!”

“It's like rabies, Peter. It has to be done.”

“That isn't a
dog
; that's a
child
,” said Peter, loudly, pushing me aside so he could follow Betsy.

“No, it isn't,” I told his retreating back. “It's a monster.”

* * *

In the end, reason prevailed.

By the time Peter had recovered from the sight of Betsy staking Frank, the sun had risen.

He paced the floor for some time, called Nancy, and had a subdued, intense conversation with her which I could not hear, though I strained to do so.

Then he snapped his phone closed. “CITAC is pulling the code to pieces. They've put the fire out down there. Looks like they got the wounded out, but they didn't find any bodies.”