Vampire Uprising (51 page)

Attached to the cop’s vest was a radio that crackled with a voice that reported, “There’s more dead at the loading dock. Looks like a bunch of the dealers and Anderson’s unit.”

“All of Anderson’s unit?”

“Haven’t found them all yet, sir, but there’s two of them in the back of a van. The dealers are toast. Anderson and two of his men are hurt pretty bad. They say the others are somewhere on the premises.”

Cole’s head hung low. “Try the offices.”

“What?” the cop snarled a few inches from his ear. “Is that where you’re holding them?”

“No, I—”

“Shut up!” Keying the radio, he said, “Sweep all the offices.”

The cop nearly pulled Cole’s arms out of their sockets while securing his wrists behind his back. From there Cole was moved toward the front door at the behest of an occasional prod from an assault rifle pounding against his spine. Considering all the dead cops discovered in that room alone, he considered himself lucky to be breathing at all. He felt even luckier when he got close enough to the front door to hold Paige’s eye for more than a second.

She nodded and showed him a shaky smile while the cops jostled past her in their haste to get him out of the building.

Gunshots crackled down the street and tires squealed. By now Cole had heard the FAMAS and Rico’s Sig Sauer enough times to know neither of those guns were being fired. Somehow that didn’t make him feel much better. The parking lot directly outside the building was filled with police cars and two large black SWAT vans. He couldn’t help but shake his head at just how far away he was from the guy who’d researched tactical teams just like this one for use in a video game.

“Top o’ the world, Ma.” Cole sighed.

“Shut your damn mouth,” another man said as he was
roughly thrown against a van, where he was searched again. There was an exchange of words and some more scuffling. When Cole was roughly turned around, a pair of new faces stared back at him.

Paige stood beside a man who looked to have spent thirty out of his forty or so years being dragged behind a truck. His pockmarked skin and bristly hair were coarse enough to scrape the paint off the SWAT van in one pass. The eyes he fixed upon Cole were light enough to be either green or gray. His stern expression, illuminated by flashing police lights and headlights trained on the parking lot, made it clear the guy had no qualms about pulling the trigger of the M-16 in his hands.

When Paige reached out for Cole, she was held back by the SWAT guy who’d taken him into custody. “I don’t give a shit what kind of pull you have,” he snapped. “This one’s in our custody now.”

The man with the M-16 and pockmarked face replied, “He’s all yours. We’re willing to cooperate.”

“If you would’ve been so generous before, maybe the rest of these assholes wouldn’t have gotten away!”

The man with the pockmarks kept his mouth shut and stepped back.

“You need to go with them, Cole,” Paige said.

Suddenly, the sight of her wasn’t so comforting. “What? That’s how you fixed this?”

“Just trust me. Go with them.”

“Go where?” Cole asked.

“If I had my way, you’d be goin’ into a fuckin’ box and buried under six feet of dirt for all those cops you killed,” the SWAT officer said. In a harsh whisper he added, “And if it weren’t for them news crews, I’d do the job myself without losing a damn bit of sleep over it.”

Cole was pulled away from the van and shoved toward another one parked ten feet away. He nearly fell on his face after two steps, finding out only then that someone had locked shackles around his ankles while he’d been looking at Paige. He looked at her again, still waiting for her to step in and play whatever card she’d been saving for him.

“You set this up!” Cole said once he realized that card wasn’t coming. “What happens now? Huh?”

Catching up to him, she explained, “I didn’t have a choice, Cole. We all got set up too well for me to do anything else. There’s another one in town somewhere.”

“Another what?”

“One like Hope. If things didn’t turn out like this, more would have died. I’m sorry.”

Cole was turned away from her and forced into the van. His stomach flipped and it became increasingly difficult to maintain his balance. Cars and vans filled the street beyond a perimeter the cops had set up. He didn’t recognize all the letters painted on those vehicles, but they had to have represented most or all of the local news stations. In the time it took for him to figure out that much, lights from a dozen different cameras were pointed his way.

Muscles strained against the metal restraints as well as the hands that shoved Cole into the back of the van. His senses were overloaded with everything from camera lights and venomous words to the scents of recent gunfire and exhaust fumes from the vans that were about to take him into a cell or possibly a shallow grave on the way to the police station.

“She would have killed you, Cole,” Paige shouted to him. “If it wasn’t Hope, it would have been the other one. I couldn’t let that happen to someone else that I …” She had trouble getting her next few words out but was also being jostled by the police officers taking over the scene, as well as the soldiers who’d been with her in that helicopter. When Cole was seated in the van and getting his shackles bolted through a steel ring between his feet, she spoke again. All he could hear was, “It was Tara! I won’t let her—”

The helicopter’s rotors powered up, washing out Paige’s voice in an all-encompassing roar.

Cole could still taste oily blood in the back of his throat. When he moved his arms, he felt certain he could pull the chains apart in a few good tries and there was enough healing serum in his system to absorb some punishment from the cops along the way.

He could get out of that van if he wanted.

At that moment, knowing what Paige had done, he just didn’t want to.

As the van doors slammed shut, sealing him in a steel box full of chains, shotguns, and an angry SWAT team mourning friends they thought he’d killed, Cole found solace in words from another man who’d become an enemy to his own people.

Is it too much to ask to receive a little gratitude?
Jonah Lancroft had written in one of the journal entries that had stuck with Cole long after he’d read them.
I’ve purged villages of evil, only to be chased out by the same frightened simpletons who’d begged for help from a deity that in all likelihood doesn’t exist. If God does exist, why wouldn’t He be far from here, creating new miracles while his former ones eke out a life of their own? If there is a God, I believe we are not forgotten by Him. We are simply allowed to live on our own and enjoy the gifts we have been given. Why, then, must so many choose to be blind to the evils that so obviously exist and can be seen, felt, and heard every day and night?

I have withdrawn into a life of quiet research, founding my reformatory as a place to keep monstrosities away from those they may harm. I have spent years studying ways to improve my fellow Skinners and give them a fighting chance against demons that have proven to be more resilient and adaptable than those who kid themselves into thinking they are the favored ones on this earth.

If we are made in God’s image, then I do not want to pray. Those words would only be seen as weakness and turned against me, just as my pleas and confessions have been thrown into my face by the select few with whom I’d mistakenly aligned myself.

And still, because I am a Skinner and know of no other way, I continue to fight. Is it wrong for me to desire a word of thanks or gesture of gratitude? Is it wrong to want the solace given to any common soldier who bleeds for home and country?

I suppose it is too much to ask. And so, from this day hence, I will never ask again.

Cole set his jaw in a firm line, clenched his fists and allowed his strength to bleed into his grip upon nothing instead of using it to make a break for it. Freedom didn’t do him any good if there was nowhere left to run.

Byers Peak, Colorado

Kawosa crouched at the edge of a sharp drop-off separating the narrow path behind him from the side of a mountain. His bony knees were splayed to either side, one of which poked out through a tear in his ragged pants. Narrow arms reached down between them and gripped the ground a few inches in front of his stubby toes. When a cold wind scratched along the Rockies, it set Kawosa’s stringy black hair into motion without flushing cheeks that were more weathered than the mound of ancient stone. Denver was a glowing collection of light and movement sixty miles to the east, and Kawosa gazed at it as if tracing every last glimmer back to its source.

A burly figure bounded through the National Forest below, appearing between the pines and leaping over sections of ground that were too densely wooded to cross on foot. If the creature had been inclined to take a more deliberate pace, its black fur would have allowed it to blend in with its surroundings. As intolerant of the terrain as he was with most everything crawling on or beneath it, he shouldered past an old tree with enough force to knock a piece of its trunk away before launching himself into the air.

In a matter of minutes the Full Blood had emerged from the forest and was crawling up the side of the mountain. Taking the narrow trail forced him to shift into the human
body he’d all but cast aside over the last few days.

“Where are your Mongrel friends?” Kawosa asked.

“Having a word with the packs in Montana and Wyoming,” Liam said in his thick, vaguely antiquated, cockney accent. “From there they’ll head south into New Mexico and out into the desert. Plenty of lost souls out there.”

“Do you think they will come around to our way of thinking?”

“After what we showed Max and Lyssa? They’d be insane to stay on their own.”

One of Kawosa’s eyebrows shifted upward so slightly that even a Full Blood’s senses might have missed the gesture. “Perhaps I should have a word with them just to be certain.”

Liam crouched so his legs could offer the rest of his body some protection against the wind’s chill. “Like you had a word with Randolph?” When Kawosa glanced over, he added, “He was sticking real close to you until now. I assume you must have done something to escape from his watchful eye.”

“He has business of his own.”

“You’re referring to the two Full Bloods that came over from across the pond?”

Smirking, Kawosa said, “He thinks there is only one new arrival.”

“Sandoval?”

Kawosa nodded and shifted his gaze back to the city.

“That Spaniard always did carry a stronger scent than most. Randolph never met him, but how’d you get him to overlook Minh?” Liam drew his legs in a little tighter and passed his tongue over a dry bottom lip when he said, “She’s not the sort any man would overlook. Even on four legs, she’s a vision. Lyin’ to humans is one thing. Lyin’ to us is another.”

“Perhaps the stench of this paved-over land had washed her from his memory. Or Randolph merely could have grown tired of our company.”

Liam drew a breath and let it out as a huff of steam from his nostrils. “I know the legends about you, Kawosa. Or Ktseena or whatever the hell the humans call you. Older than
the deepest dirt and teller of the very first lie. The Trickster Coyote that’s been roaming the New World when there wasn’t nothin’ here but herds of buffalo and teepees.”

“My, my. You are very knowledgeable.”

“Why the hell do you think we busted you out of that dungeon?”

“There are more reasons than you know,” Kawosa said.

As he stood up, Liam shifted into his hulking two-legged form. His feet scraped upon the narrow path but he hung onto the rock as though his paws had been nailed in place. Stooping down so his single eye level was with Kawosa’s face, he snarled, “Randolph’s head has always been full of smoke and foolish notions. He gets sentimental and thinks too much about the past. He’s also restless. I know he wants to leave here, and I ain’t of a mind to stop him. You got a job to do here, though, Coyote. Don’t you forget that.”

Despite the fact that the Full Blood loomed over him while casually stripping away layers of rock with sicklelike claws, Kawosa regarded him with the same amount of concern he might show to a posturing eight-year-old boy. “The Half Breeds are my children. Guiding them, shaping them, giving them a purpose is no chore.”

“And the Mongrels?”

“They are a thorn in both our sides.”

Only another Full Blood could have recognized the glimmer of a smirk that flicked across Liam’s gaping, hellish mouth. “Speaking of thorns,” he said with a simple nod toward a section of the city that was alive with circling helicopters and flashing red and blue lights.

Whether he noticed Liam’s grin or not, Kawosa did nothing to hide his own. “The humans were a simple matter. I told the police their dead comrades were winning the fight against the Nymar and they believed. It has always been so. And no matter what the Skinners know, what they concoct, or what they do, they are humans as well. Playing with them has always been one of the greatest pleasures of my very long life.”

“So, sitting cooped up in Lancroft’s basement. That was a pleasure?”

When Kawosa sneered, it gave Liam a glimpse at a hatred that ran down to the bottom of a black, soulless pit. The Full Blood moved away and adjusted his grip upon the mountain accordingly.

“Lancroft was exceptional,” Kawosa admitted. “He taught me the danger of my own arrogance. Although I would have enjoyed waiting for him to choke on his own confidence and wander close enough to the bars of that cell so I could tear his head from his shoulders, it was even sweeter to see him killed by the very Skinners he cherished so dearly. Now, with everything that has been set into motion, the fruit of Lancroft’s efforts will unleash discord the likes of which I have only dreamed.”

“Ohhhh yes,” Liam sighed. “The times, they are a’changin’.”

Denver
Six blocks south of the police barricade