Vampire Uprising

Chapter Thirty-Three

The building had a simple floor plan with one ring of rooms surrounding a block of larger ones. One large hallway wrapped all the way around, connecting two main entrances, one in front and the other in the back. Rico guessed there was at least one side door but had been too busy getting shot at to find it. The other Amriany came in through the front and fought their way inside, guns blazing to make the biggest spectacle possible. Somewhere along the line Nadya had caught a bullet. Gunari dragged her down the hall by her collar so her legs were splayed out behind them and she was able to keep firing her semiautomatic in controlled bursts.

After regrouping with them, Rico tapped his earpiece and asked, “Cole, where the hell are you?”

“Right behind you.” Sure enough, Cole rounded a corner to find Rico and Drina on opposite sides of the hall with their backs pressed against a soda and snack machine, respectively. Before he could get to Rico’s side, the rest of the Amriany came along to meet them.

“The Nymar retreated into the east side of the building.” Knowing Cole’s lack of an internal compass, Rico pointed down the hall past the vending machines and added, “That way. They drove us back here after we took a few of them down then fell back into that room at the end of the hall. I’m guessing it’s an open space because they’d be crammed in like clowns in a Volkswagen if it was just another closet.

“Did you hit anyone other than Nymar?” Cole asked.

“Nope. Barely slowed down the ones I did hit. Only a few of them twitched at the antidote rounds. The rest’ve been scampering around like rats. Probably just holding us here until their backup arrives.”

Drina pressed a finger to her earpiece and frowned. “Tobar was taken by the police.”

“And that’d be their backup,” Rico grunted.

“Let’s just clean this place out,” Cole said. “I’ve got the best armor, so I’ll draw the aggro.”

“What is he talking about?” Gunari asked as he tightened a length of torn fabric around one of Nadya’s knees. Her leg was soaked in blood that oozed out through her jeans, but she barely acknowledged it with anything more than a sharp breath.

Rico shook his head and chanced a look around the soda machine. “I barely ever know what he’s talkin’ about.”

“Aggro,” Cole said impatiently. “One guy goes in to draw fire and the others circle around to flank the bad guys. Don’t any of you guys ever do any gaming? For the love of God, it’s the twenty-first century!”

The screaming from the front half of the building died down, followed by the occasional crash of a door being kicked in.

“By the way,” Cole said as he gripped his .45 and closed his coat by threading one of the thick wooden slivers that passed for buttons through a rough slit Rico had cut into the leather, “there’s some other shapeshifter running around here. Not a werewolf. Mind controller. Be on the lookout for him.” With that, he set his sights on the doors at the end of the hall and rushed toward them.

There was plenty of noise within the building to mask his footsteps as he jogged toward the door. Although he could wrap his mind around any number of inhuman terrors that might be waiting for him in the next room, he still didn’t know how he was going to deal with the police. Apart from not shooting them, his choices seemed pretty limited. A humorless grin drifted onto his face as he brought his gun up to eye level and extended his other hand toward the door. The way the odds were stacked, he probably wouldn’t need to worry about much of anything beyond the next half hour, so it didn’t make sense to plan much further than that. The pain within his chest tightened as though a length of dental floss was being drawn taut after being wrapped around all of his major organs. The muscles he was about to use all flushed with heat as his throat became drier than the floor of an old kiln. A tickling sensation sprang up near the base of his spine, and he was hungrier than he’d ever been.

Cole meant to shove the door open but wound up knocking it off one of its hinges and leaving it askew in its frame. Compared to the stark lighting of the hallway, the space directly in front of him was a single shadowy mass. Several bare bulbs hung from the ceiling to reveal a loading dock or some sort of industrial storage space. Pallets covered in dusty tarps formed a wall to his left. Two vans were parked to his right with their noses pointed toward a pair of large garage doors covered by steel shutters. The lights hung from the ceiling amid a thick webbing of girders and beams, topped by the slanted roof of the building itself. He took all of this in within his first few steps. That was more than enough time to notice the Nymar that swarmed in on him from all sides like a colony of centipedes.

Since police departments didn’t generally hire from the superhuman wall-crawling labor pool, Cole fired at every overhead Nymar he spotted. One slender figure wrapped its arms around a beam and looked down at him with wide unblinking eyes. Cole aimed carefully and fired again. His shot sparked against the beam but got close enough to shake the Nymar loose. The vampire hit the floor on its back. Now that he was beneath the lights, the solid black hue of its skin melted into thick stripes. Cole meant to hold the Nymar beneath his foot long enough to get to his spear, but his heel dropped heavily onto the Nymar’s upper chest to snap its collarbone with a solid wet crunch.

While he shifted his aim to the shape dropping down to get behind him, he pulled his coat open and reached for the weapon harness. One shot punched through the Nymar’s ribs, the next clipped its ear, and the one after that was a clean miss. The vampire wore only a pair of black pants, keeping as much of its shadowy skin exposed as possible. His bare feet slapped against the concrete floor, putting an extra kick behind the breath he used to spit a wad of venom at Cole’s face.

The toxic substance hit his hand and neck, cooling them on impact and forcing him to look away when the next wave of gunfire erupted. Most of those shots erupted from a Sig Sauer and a FAMAS submachine gun.

“How many times I gotta tell you to stop goin’ for those head shots?” Rico snarled as he moved to Cole’s side. With a few more pulls of his trigger, the big man carved a large and very messy hole through the spitting Nymar’s chest. It fell straight back with cracks forming in its flesh before it hit the floor.

As Rico and Cole moved forward, Drina and Gunari fanned out to either side. Even while hobbling on a wounded leg, Nadya joined her fellow Amriany by finding the first piece of solid cover and running behind it.

“Goddamn Gypsies,” Rico growled as he fired at a shotgun-wielding Nymar that stepped out from behind one of the stacks of pallets. “First chance to hide and they run for it.”

Overhead, electricity crackled through the uppermost fixtures nestled above the beams to bring several rows of fluorescent bulbs to life. A few seconds later the other half of the room was illuminated, exposing the Nymar that were sneaking down from where they’d been hidden.

“I think you can thank the Gypsies for that,” Cole chided.

Rico squeezed off a few quick rounds to put down one long-haired Nymar that stuck her head around the corner. “Don’t call them Gypsies,” he said. “They don’t like that.”

Cole emptied his last few rounds into a group of Nymar gathering near large doors that must have opened onto one of the truck-filled lots outside the building. Even though he could see the reaction of the antidote infused into the bullets on two of the Nymar that were hit, the ones with the Shadow Spore barely flinched. The standard issue vampires staggered away, allowing their enhanced partners to close the distance between themselves and the Skinners.

“Cops are headed your way,” Prophet said through the earpiece.

“Shit,” Cole grunted.

Rico reloaded his Sig Sauer with practiced efficiency, but had given up on trying to take deliberate shots. “I know. I heard.”

“Not that. My phone’s ringing.” After digging out the cell, Cole glanced at the screen. “It’s Paige.”

“Better take it. She’s been known to get snippy if you ignore her calls.”

Even in the middle of a war zone, Cole had to chuckle at that one.

“We’re only about fifteen minutes away,” Paige said. Her voice was straining to be heard over the roar of several loud engines.

“Are you on a helicopter?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you, these guys are serious.”

“Well so are the Nymar,” Cole said as three of the vampires coordinated their efforts to form a quick firing line and unleash a salvo in his direction.

“When I get there, you’re gonna have to trust me,” Paige said.

“What’s the plan?”

“Just follow my lead and trust me. Please, Cole.”

When his .45 ran dry, he holstered the gun and gripped his spear in both hands. “Someone was here impersonating you. Called himself Kawosa or something like that. Ring any bells?”

“Great. Another thing coming after us. Never heard of him.”

“How long before you get here?”

“Shouldn’t be long,” she replied. “Are you going to be okay?”

“As good as always.”

“Just hang in there and—”

“Follow your lead,” Cole interrupted as a pair of Nymar leapt from their positions behind a parked van to bounce off the walls and launch themselves at him. “Got it.” The last syllable was still in his mouth when he held the spear up to block the first incoming Nymar. The vampire’s hair streamed over her shoulders and she bared two sets of fangs at him. Apparently, she wasn’t worried about poisoning him, so she left the curved pair sheathed beneath her gums.

His spear caught her across the chest. Cole took advantage of her momentum by pivoting to send her flailing into a stack of pallets. Still hesitant to use anything without a trigger, Rico blasted another airborne Nymar with a torrent of .45 caliber slugs that sent it bouncing off a cement pillar and to the floor. “Get to the garage doors,” he said while running to finish off the Nymar he’d taken down. “Spread the word to the Amriany.”

Gunari and Drina had moved their fight through the open section of the room. They held their own well enough to force the Nymar to form a small cluster there. Every few seconds the Nymar sent a few out at a time, like larger versions of the tendrils that crept through their own bodies.

Cole rushed at the Nymar he’d bounced off a post, snarling viciously as he impaled the creature at the end of his spear. This wasn’t one of the Nymar infected with the Shadow Spore, which made it easier to find a soft spot with the metal tip of his spear. “Where are the cops?” he asked.

“They’re already here,” she replied. “Are you deaf?”

“I mean the cops you were going to frame us for killing. Where are they?”

“Are you going to … let me go?” she grunted.

“If you tell me quickly, yes.”

“There’s two in one of the offices and more in one of the vans,” she told him. “But you’re too late to do anything about them. They’re dead and one of your weapons is still sticking out of a body. I don’t know what kind of shit you smear all over those sticks, but I bet it’s real distinctive on any tests the cops might run on the wounds.”

“Where’d you get one of our weapons?”

The Nymar showed Cole a tired smirk as the light in her eyes faded. Black tendrils crept out from the spot where she’d been impaled to grip the spear like several weak little fingers trying unsuccessfully to coax the weapon from where it was lodged. Suddenly, a rage swept through Cole’s entire body and he pushed the spear down until the metallic tip scraped against the cement beneath her.

“Answer me!”

She gripped the spear and was able to lift it up an inch or so while snarling savagely at him.

If not for the thorns in the handle, the spear might very well have slipped between his fingers or been taken away from him altogether. The Nymar’s burst of strength was not only fueled by the thing inside her, but from a final act of self preservation. She became stronger than any Nymar he had ever faced. Paige had warned him about jolts where a vampire could flush all of their blood-fueled power into a single attack. He was taught to either do as much damage to such a Nymar as quickly as possible or get the hell away until it faded. With his spear already trapped, both of those choices were blocked.

It was then that he felt a surge of his own.

His hands closed around the spear with the sole intent of preventing the weapon from being taken from him. As his grip became tighter, the thorns were driven in deep enough to hit nerves that hadn’t been deadened by previous contact or protected by scar tissue. They dug all the way through, growing longer due to the desperate commands rushing through his mind, until they formed little bumps on the tops of his hands. Letting out a primal scream, he straightened his legs and used both hands to scoop the Nymar up off the floor. She still grabbed the spear, if only to keep from sliding all the way down the length of the weapon like a hunk of meat that was too heavy for its kebob.

“Where’d you get one of our weapons?” Cole roared.

The Nymar’s legs flopped uselessly and her mouth hung open as she struggled painfully against the laws of gravity. “Hope … brought it … from Miami.”

“Are any more cops going to die?”

“Most of the ones that tried to get close to us … are already …” All of her grievous wounds caught up to her and the color drained from her face.

Rico’s voice echoed through the room, tainted by rage, pain, or both. A small group of Nymar rushed around the stack of pallets, only to be stopped cold by the sight of Cole holding the impaled Nymar several inches off the floor.

“… already dead,” the Nymar croaked. “Killed by Skinners … all over the country.” The fight was quickly draining out of her, and the effort of holding onto the spear dimmed the spark of life in her eyes even more. The only thing she had left was a tired, resigned smile.

Since the Nymar seemed content to fade at her own pace, Cole shook his spear to rattle the body attached to it.

Her eyes snapped open and she looked around as if she were taking in the sights for the first time. Fresh waves of gunfire erupted in the vicinity, but since he wasn’t getting pelted with live rounds, he figured Rico and the Amriany were dealing with it. “Tell me the rest, God damn you!” he demanded.

“Every cop in this building will be executed,” the Nymar announced. Baring her fangs in a spiteful glare, she added, “You being here will be enough to brand every one of you as cop killers. You’re fucked! Every Skinner everywhere is fucked!”

Cole could no longer contain his anger. He didn’t even want to. He twisted his entire body around to fling the Nymar at the pallets without a single thought about the strength required to toss her that far. Ignoring the fiery pain that incinerated his insides, he tapped his earpiece while racing to the door that led to the hallway.

“Something’s happening to those cops that busted in here,” Cole said.

Rico’s voice was the first to come back to him. “Whatever it is, I hope it lasts long enough for us to get the hell outta here!”

“I’m with him,” Prophet chimed in. “By the way, I got all I’m gonna get from this computer.”

“Prophet, just go. Rico, we need to get to those cops. They’re going to be torn apart.”

“They probably got bigger guns than us and—” Something snarled into his earpiece but was just as quickly silenced by a muffled gunshot. “And we got our hands full in here as it is.”

“Fine,” Cole snapped as he bolted into the hallway with a few stray rounds thumping against the back of his coat. “I’ll handle this on my own. Come find me when you can.”

Following the sound of shouting, gunshots, and squawking radios, Cole jogged down the hallway to retrace the steps that had brought him to the loading dock. The doors behind him were thrown open and someone charged through them. Driving his shoulder into the same soda machine Rico had used for cover a while ago, he allowed his body to slide along it while turning around to point his spear at his pursuer.

Nadya hobbled down the hall carrying Drina’s FAMAS with the stock pressed against her shoulder and the muzzle pointed downward. “Where are you going?”

“Those cops are going to be killed.”

“I know. I heard what that Nymar said as you lifted her. How did you do that?”

Cole had already turned back around and was heading toward the branch of the hall that led to the front of the building. “I don’t know. Adrenaline, I guess.”

“Where are you going?”

“I didn’t sign up for this Skinner crap just to let innocent people get killed while I run away.”

“Then I want to help you.”

“But you’re injured.”

Shifting the submachine gun against her shoulder, she nodded at him and said, “So are you.”

When Cole looked down, he saw no fewer than five deep gouges across his chest and a few holes in his jeans that were ringed with blood. Although he could recall being scratched a few times, he didn’t know where the holes in his jeans had come from. The healing serum in his system must have been doing its job because the wounds weren’t anywhere close to slowing him down. Most of the commotion he heard was confined to the rooms closest to the building’s front entrance, so that’s where he went. Since he didn’t feel like arguing with Nadya, he tucked the spear under his arm and reloaded the .45 before jamming it back into its holster.

“What will we do when we get there?” she asked.

“Will your partners back us up?”

“There were many Nymar back there, including Shadow Spore and a Kintalaphi. My partners will be lucky to get out alive.”

“Then maybe you should go help them.”

“We came to do a job and we’ll do it,” she said. “They do not need me getting underfoot and you should not go on alone.”

“All right, then,” Cole sighed as he placed his hand on the long metal bar of the door separating the hallway from the front of the building. “Sounds like those cops are fighting for their lives, so let’s help them out. Hopefully that’ll be enough to convince them which side we’re on.”

“And what about the police that have already been killed? Aren’t you and your friend wanted for that?”

“We’ll wait for a lull in the fight and slip away.”

“What is your plan for slipping away?”

“Ask me when the shooting stops,” Cole said as he shoved the door open. “Hopefully I’ll come up with something by then.”