Blood Apocalypse - 04 (29 page)

“What the fuck do we do with him?” Hammer asked above the yelling.

Dom shrugged. “Beats the shit out of me,” he yelled. “I don’t want to shoot him, it might attract more.”

“Like his screaming hasn’t attracted them already.” Ha
mmer held his hands up to deflect the onslaught of whirling arms and legs.

Dom nodded. “You’re right.” He kicked up the lid on the box of earth and shoved the little vampire into the crate then slammed the lid down, the little monster inside scratching and clawing at the lid. He looked at Hammer and asked, “Silver n
itrate or UV?”

Hammer shrugged and said, “Both?”

Each man pulled a different grenade from his vest and pulled the pin. They flicked the release lever and counted then lifted the lid and slid the grenade into the box and slammed the lid down, latching it. Both men dove for the door of the caboose and hit the ground outside just as the grenades went off. The resultant explosion blew the sides out of the caboose and sent splinters of wood, bits of imported soil and pieces of Kentucky fried asshole flying into the desert night.

Hammer lay on the ground looking up at the full moon and the night sky. “Well, that was interesting.”

“Yeah. Let’s hope that wasn’t the engineer,” Dom chuckled.

*****

“Sicarii!” the enforcer yelled. “It is a trap! The hunters were prepared for our attack!” He screamed as he fell to the ground in front of him, black blood pouring from an open wound in his shoulder. The wound must have been from a silver bullet as it was not healing, but appeared to have passed cleanly through without killing him.

“Fool, they are not prepared for the destruction that is the Sicarii!” the dark vampire snarled. “This is their attempt at d
efending themselves from our overwhelming numbers!”

“Sicarii, they have brought the
sun
!” the enforcer cried, trying to get to his knees. “The forward wave has been all but decimated, completely ashed in the blink of an eye as if touched by the finger of God Himself. It crosses their paths and all of their children die with them at its touch!”

The dark vampire’s eyes narrowed and his brows knit t
ogether as he rose from his makeshift throne. He stood tall and gazed out across the sea of advancing bodies and saw the light come from the sky again, burning a path of destruction through his army and the resultant orange ash rise into the night sky. He felt the cold fingers of dread grip his dead heart and twist at him.

Now he knew what he was overlooking. He knew what he forgot to take into mind when he planned his attack on cre
ation…in man’s resourcefulness at killing each other, he had developed weapons that could be turned against even vampires. Weapons of Mass Destruction that could result in devastating losses to even an army that was nearly a million strong of undead.

The Sicarii shook with rage as he stepped down from his throne and stepped through the advancing crowd of warriors, still fighting each other to advance to the battlefield. His anger grew as he looked up into the heavens and he recognized the witchcraft that he faced now.

TECHNOLOGY
.

“Sicarii, what can we do?” The enforcer held a hand over his wound to stave off the flow of blood from his shoulder.

“Be still, my warrior,” he said softly. “I will destroy this atrocity myself so that my army can feast on the life blood of my enemies.”

The dark vampire shot through the crowd so quickly that the enforcer never saw him leave. He simply vanished.  He blinked his eyes to clear them to make sure he hadn’t imagined it, but his eyes did not deceive him…his master had disappeared.

The Sicarii had no sooner dove into the crowd before he felt the sudden drop in his energy levels...and this wasn’t from the loss of his forces. He stumbled and slammed into more than a handful of his own people before he realized exactly what had happened. He paused and stared back at the train, his eyes straining past the onrushing forces to the slowly rising pillar of smoke beyond the hills behind him. His anchor to his homeland had been destroyed and he could feel the energy from that tie fading.

The Sicarii ignored the frenzied vampires pushing past him and choked back the seed of fear that caught in his chest as his eyes followed the bluish grey smoke rising up into night sky. Slowly he turned back to the task at hand and steeled himself for the slaughter that was about to unfold at his own hands. He snarled with guttural hatred as his feet dug into the soft sand once more. These humans
would
pay.

*****

Damien fought his way through their own forces, his eyes feral, his face set in a vicious snarl. As each vampire from the attacking horde fought their way up the embankments, Damien raced past the others to face them. He could sense their power or lack of it as they approached each other, and most were mere baby vamps, unworthy of his time or efforts. Most would bare their fangs and try to attack with their nails, but he’d merely rip their heads from their shoulders and roll it back down the embankment, ready to race off with the next one.

Rachel spoke up as he ran from vampire to vampire, ending them before they ever really got the opportunity to begin. “I’ve found a cluster for you, lover,” she whispered in his ear. “But you’ll have to wait for them.”

“Where?!” he shouted above the roar of the battle.

“No need to shout, my love. I’m here with you always.”

“Show them to me,” he growled, growing impatient with these young, powerless vampires.

“They are at the rear of the pack. Cowering from the human made sun. The Sicarii has ordered them forward, and they are coming, but they are coming slowly.”

Damien growled again and started to move down the embankment toward the flowing mass of bodies. “What are you doing?!” she exclaimed. “You’ll be the end of us both!”

“Not if I stay to the edges.”

“The flying machines are destroying everything along the edges!” she cried.

“And they just passed by,” he answered her as he fought against the tide. “It will take a few moments for them to realign themselves and start again.”

Vampires all around him began ashing and exploding as a POD station lit them up, destroying them where they stood and Damien dove for the furthest edge of lake bed, barely avoiding the .50 caliber fire. Shrapnel from the rounds hit the surrounding rock and rained down around him, burning his skin where it touched. But Damien ignored the pain and took to his feet again, fighting the flow of bodies.

“At least go along the tops of the ridges. You’ll not have to fight the flow,” the soft female voice directed. Damien shifted to his left and ran up and along the curve of the ridge, gaining speed and came back down at the rear of the flow. “There they are.”

He plunged into the crowd and came in behind a group of vampires whose age and power flowed from them like a beacon. They were so densely packed and focused on what was happening before them at the lake bed that none noticed him drive his hands into the backs of the two in front of him and rip their hearts from their bodies. Those behind marched over their corpses as they advanced, grinding them into mush. He bit large pieces from each heart and swallowed them down, fighting the sickening feeling of their power becoming part of his own as he moved with the flow and devoured the power of two more in his path.

“Yes, my love!” Rachel cried in his head. “Eat! Eat and b
ecome powerful!”

Damien continued to sneak attack the most powerful of them until she called to him again, “Lover?”

“What?” he mumbled with his mouth dripping black.

“You must hurry.”

*****

Mitchell had just moved forward to better see the monitors when something very large hit the blast windows…HARD! The blast proof acrylic cracked within the stainless steel frame and the concrete holding it in place showed stress fractures along the lower corner.

“What the fuck was that?” Spalding asked, pulling his carbine to the ready and focusing on the window.

“Exterior view. Now!” Tufo ordered.

The technician operating the multiple cameras turned to him, “Sir, we don’t have any eyes outside the bunker itself.”

Mark gave the man a hard stare. “Why not?”

The tech shook his head. “I don’t know, Major.”

“I never ordered it,” Mitchell said.

Jack turned away from the window and held a hand up. “Sheridan’s on the roof of the Headquarters Building. Maybe he can give us an on scene report.”

Tufo nodded to him and Jack keyed the radio, “Newcastle Actual, come in.”

“Go ahead, Chief,” Sheridan responded.

“Something just rattled the entire bunker here. Looks like it hit the window but we can’t make out anything. Do you see an
ything outside that could have caused it? Over.”

“Wait one. Repositioning,” Sheridan lied. A moment later he came back on the radio. “Negative, Jack. The area surroun
ding you is all clear,” Sheridan’s voice crackled across the overhead speakers in the OpCom.

Jack looked about the room and stepped to the window to peer out. With the red light inside and the full moon out, he e
xpected better visibility, but he couldn’t see much. “Any activity at your location, over?”

“That’s a negative, mate. Nice fireworks show on the lake bed though, over,” Sheridan reported.

Jack turned around and shook his head. “No idea, boss.” He shrugged his shoulders again just as something hit the window hard enough to knock him away from it. He rolled from the window and came up with his carbine pointed at the opening. He was shocked to see that the blast proof acrylic was now cracked in a jagged ‘X’ pattern and the concrete was splitting away at the corners along the bottom on both sides. Dust and sand settled on the floor from the cracks.

Jack keyed his mic again and yelled, “Sherry, goddammit, what’s out there?”

“I’m telling ya, mate, I’m not seeing anything!” he yelled back. “If somebody’s attacking you, I’m not seeing it! There’s no blast, no debris, no incoming plumes…I don’t know what to tell ya.”

Jack turned back to Tufo and then Mitchell. “I’m going out there.”

“Negative!” they both shouted at the same time.

Mark stood up from the command chair. “So far, we are s
ecure in here, and protecting the controls to this satellite is
essential
to the plan, Chief!”

“I concur,” Mitchell stated.

“That’s why
I’m
going,” Max said, stepping toward the front of the room.

“As am I.” Viktor draped the crossbow across his shoulder.

“I can’t allow—” Mitchell began.

Max held up a hand to stop him. “Colonel, we’ve already had this discussion. If that is the Sicarii trying to get in here, I’m likely the only one who will be able to stop him.”

“Firing again,” the satellite control tech reported.

“If they’re going out there, they may need cover fire,” Jack said.

Mitchell ground his teeth until he was sure it could be heard over everything else. He looked at Tufo who was shaking his head. “I don’t like this.”

“This is my fight, Major,” Max said expectantly.

“Your call, Mark. This is your dance,” Matt said.

“Yeah, hang it all on me,” he muttered. “Fine. Go. But take Phoenix with you.”

Max nodded to Jack and Viktor rolled his eyes. Jack fought the urge to say, ‘Let’s do this, Pops,’ as he really liked the idea of seeing his child born.

Tufo looked around the room. “Jacobs, Lamb, Tracy…go with them. I want a secure perimeter around the front of this bunker. If those bastards figured out that the HQ is a ruse, we’re going to need a secure line out there.”

All three operators snapped to and fell in behind Thompson. They went to the side blast door and filed through the antechamber. As they emerged from the building next to the bunker, they assumed tactical position on either side of the bunker. Jack stepped next to a POD station. “Did you guys see what was hitting the OpCom?”

Neither man answered him and he looked more closely in the moonlight. The man standing next to him leaned against the building in a casual manner. Jack elbowed him. “Hey, pal?” The man fell over, his head rolling away from his shoulders. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. Jack keyed his coms, “We got a problem.”

“Report.”

“All of the POD personnel out here are dead,” Jack reported calmly.

There was a brief pause before Tufo came back, “Say again, Chief?”

“I repeat, all POD personnel stationed outside the bunker are dead. As in decapitated. Over.”

Max stepped out into the battlement and drew his sword. “Show yourself, you bastard!” he yelled into the darkness. “I know you’re out there, I can smell your rotting flesh!”

Jack was just about to inform him that a direct challenge might not be the best idea when a voice echoed back from the darkness, “I see your bravado hasn’t lessened over the years, Centurion.” It hissed from the shadows and Jack couldn’t pi
npoint a location.