Hunter of the Dead (30 page)

With their visors down, Price found it impossible to identify any of the Inquisitors. One of them cried out, “Go, go, go! Move in for the kill!”

The Inquisitors began holstering their firearms and drawing cutting implements and religious icons. The wretched mess of gristle and muscle which had been Cicatrice pulsated on the floor. The first man on the scene charged forward with an axe, and brought it swinging down in an arc at what had formerly been Cicatrice’s head.

A pseudopod which had gradually reordered itself into a flayed human hand snatched the axehead out of the air, stopping it in mid-collision and snapping both of the axe-wielding Inquisitor’s arms with the impact in a sickening series of crunches. Cicatrice roared, flipping the axe over and swinging it one-handed so that he easily cut through plate, chain, and ankles alike, severing both feet in one motion and sending the unlucky axe-wielder tumbling to the ground.

“He’s recovering!” Bonaparte shouted, “Don’t let up the pressure!”

Within just that space of time Cicatrice had recovered to the point that he had the appearance of a skinless man, a gruesome illustration out of
Gray’s Anatomy
but instead of lying blandly on the page, he was raging out like a furious bull.

Chastened by their comrade’s double amputation, the rest of the Inquisitors maintained their distance. Several had crucifixes attached to the ends of long poles. One of the Inquisitors reached out and pressed the crucifix at the end of his pole to Cicatrice’s chest, where his ribcage was still trying to reform.

The open flesh of the vampire’s chest sizzled where the silver icon touched it, and ceased to mend. With a hand which still had bone fingers poking through raggedly flowing meat, Cicatrice grabbed the crucifix, which caused his still-ruined hand to sizzle, and flung it towards the missing door.

The force of Cicatrice’s yank took the Inquisitor who had been holding the crucifix off his feet. He stumbled and fell right into Cicatrice’s armpit. As though he were cracking a nut with a nutcracker, Cicatrice squeezed with his armpit and shattered the Inquisitor’s helmet, which flaked away like the shell off a hard-boiled egg.

Cicatrice wrapped his bloody, mending arm around the Inquisitor’s neck and caught him in a chokehold. The man’s face turned purple and he slapped uselessly at the monster’s arm, as though tapping out of a for-fun wrestling match.

Cicatrice’s eyeless skull, dancing with muscle and sinew like a dot matrix printer gradually laying down words, leaned in towards his captured prey. The grotesque visage opened its mouth, its stump of a tongue just coming back together enough to say, “You picked the wrong fucker to fuck with!”

Suddenly the captured Inquisitor’s hair began to gray and his skin began to wrinkle. Skin began to re-cover Cicatrice’s body as his healing process went into overdrive.

“No, you idiots!” Price grunted, scrabbling across the floor and snatching a pistol out of the holster of an Inquisitor who wasn’t paying attention. “Don’t let him feed!”

Price leveled the pistol at the captured Inquisitor’s head. The world was still swimming from pain and revulsion, but Price had held guns level in far bleaker situations. Price didn’t recognize the kid, but he vaguely reminded him of Jerry Govarti, an Inquisitor he had run with back in the ‘70s.

“Sorry, Jerry.”

Price put one in the back of the kid’s head. Cicatrice roared with frustration, his meal suddenly spoiled and twitching from nerve impulses.

The air stank of blood, offal, and the spilled bowels and bladders of the dead. It had been a long time since Price had been caught in quite such an abbatoir, and he took the opportunity to turn and retch up whatever little was left of his supper from that evening.

“Give him another whiff of grapeshot,” Bonaparte ordered.

The Inquisitors poured metal into Cicatrice like there was no tomorrow. Several came down to clicking their empty shotguns. Price dragged himself into a corner and propped himself up to get a better look at the action.

He had never particularly liked Cicatrice, per se, but he had always had a certain respect for him, and like any reasonable individual, an intense and implacable fear. As such, he didn’t like seeing the mighty man reduced to a ruined lump of protoplasm. The Inquisitors didn’t let up until they had practically pureed him.

This time, the mass that had been the vampire patriarch was very slow to reform into anything resembling a human form. The gelatin-like mess quivered and raged in one or two directions, but its regeneration lacked the urgency it had shown last time. Even a vampire House patriarch was subject to the laws of physics, and Price had deprived him of his meal. He would fast be running out of energy, arcane or otherwise.

Bonaparte took off her helmet and knelt down at Price’s side.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m great. Fuck Folgers. This is how I like to start every day.”

Bonaparte put a hand on his shoulder and she even seemed to smile.

“Do you need anything?”

“I could use a juicebox. Maybe one of those, what do you call those things that you use to watch a play better? Opera glasses.”

She squeezed his shoulder.

“We’ll get some paramedics out here to see to your leg shortly. We just have to finish up first.”

Price nodded. She rose and turned back to her men.

“Icons! Put one on each limb and at least one more on the center of gravity.”

Eight Inquisitors stepped forward tentatively with crosses on poles like the poor, unlucky Jerry Govarti-looking fellow. One held down each of his feet and hands and a fifth placed his on Cicatrice’s side. Where the crosses touched Cicatrice’s bare, exposed flesh sizzled and burned and the area around it ceased to heal.

Bonaparte strode across the room like a Roman conqueror at his own parade. She stepped gingerly over the bodies of her fallen comrades and came to a stop over Cicatrice’s body. He had seemed to stop fighting, finally accepting that he was pinned. His face had recovered to the extent that he could speak and turned to look up at Bonaparte balefully with his Martian eye.

“Why did you let that buffoon lead your charge?” he croaked out.

She examined her fingernails.

“He came to me. I promised a chance to put you down. I let him take it. He did not do so well.”

Cicatrice glanced around the room as visors went up and helmets came off.

“I recognize some faces.”

“All of us have sworn revenge on you for one reason or another. This was an all-volunteer raid.”

Cicatrice cackled, a mirthless sound that chilled Price to the bone. The man was normally so perversely incapable of showing emotion, even now, at the end, it seemed completely alien for him to do so even mockingly.

“If every man who’s ever sworn revenge on me had taken it, I’d’ve been put down a hundred thousand times by now.”

“Just once will satisfy me.” Bonaparte nudged Cicatrice’s right wrist with her boot. “I see you were an Inquisitor once. I’ve always considered it a special duty to put down former Inquisitors who have been turned. The same way I put down my own father, who taught me everything I know. It’s a matter of respect for the office.”

“Kings don’t kill kings,” Cicatrice whispered.

Bonaparte nodded. She pulled open the Velcro of her riot gear and reached into her blouse to draw out a beautifully carved wooden stake. She held it over Cicatrice’s good eye so he could get a good look.

“Remember this?”

He nodded.

“It was the closest I ever came to being killed.”

Bonaparte tapped her glass eye with the point of the stake.

“Me, too. I refuse to use this on any other nightcrawler. This stake’s reserved for you.”

Cicatrice nodded. Then, with an unholy roar he arched his back and brought his spine back down on the floor with an earthshattering crack, ripping a massive hole in the floor. As Cicatrice’s body disappeared, the five Inquisitors who had been holding him down stumbled.

One tripped over her own feet and nearly tumbled into the hole in the floor, but managed to grab onto the edge with both hands just in time. She managed to pull herself up so that almost her entire torso was above floor level, but then her arms were locked and she was having trouble getting her legs up.

“Help,” entreated the Inquisitor who had nearly fallen into the hole, a 30-something woman with a short mop of black hair, “Give me a hand, I need to…”

The raven-haired woman’s expression changed to one of alarm. Bonaparte and another Inquisitor rushed to grab her shoulders and a sickening rip split the air, followed by a prolonged splat. Bonaparte and the other helper were suddenly caught flat-footed as the black-haired Inquisitor suddenly came rocketing up out of her precarious position as though she had suddenly become fifty pounds lighter.

As they fumbled inelegantly with the body, Price saw that her body had been ripped in half at the navel, and her intestines and lower GI tract had unspooled down into the apartmentbelow. Lengths of viscera still hung from the half-woman, trailing down into what was no doubt a gruesome scene in the lower apartment.

Bonaparte blinked the blood out of her eyes, but that was about the extent of her confusion.

“Go, go, go!” she shouted, pointing around the room. “He’s on the next floor down! If you have a rig set up rappel down! Everybody else take the stairs!”

The Inquisitors who had come in through the windows began jumping out of them, and the others scrambled through the missing door. All except Bonaparte, who remained standing there, a grim look on her face.

“Don’t do it,” Price said.

“He’ll be gone otherwise.”

“You’ll break both your damn legs.”

She shrugged.

“I never planned to walk away from this, anyway.”

Grimacing, Bonaparte dropped into the hole. Price watched as only her fingers were visible to him, grabbing onto the edge. Then she grunted and let go. He lay back, for the first time realizing how fast his heart was racing and how much pain he was in, from his leg. Every nerve in his lower body was screaming at him, and probably had been the whole time, but he’d either been so full of adrenaline or so distracted by the histrionics he hadn’t noticed.

He glanced around the blood-spattered room. The walls were painted with effluvia, and broken bodies lay in every horrific position imaginable.

“Jesus,” Price muttered, looking around at the the wreckage and eviscera strewn about his apartment, “I’m never getting the security deposit back on this place.”

With considerable effort, Price pulled himself forward on his elbows, nearly slipping several times on the bloody surface of his floor.

“Fucker,” he muttered as he skinned one elbow, but it wasn’t nearly as long as he had expected until he was over the lip of the hole in his floor and able to look down.

Cicatrice was at the window, but an Inquisitor in a rappelling rig appeared, and though he seemed startled, leveled his shotgun at the vampire and pulled the trigger. Cicatrice jumped out of the way, though he still caught a good shoulderful of buckshot.

The vampire was still naked, the only vestiges of his clothes a few tattered strings and the all-but-ruined plate of armor he wore over his heart and upper ribcage. His skin was almost all gone and in places bone showed where his flesh was still mending. It was impossible to miss that after his second round of being blown to bits, he was healing much slower.

Bonaparte was on the floor, her shotgun leveled at him. She was limping ever-so-slightly. Perhaps she had turned her ankle in the drop, but she had certainly not shattered both legs as Price had expected. A door to Cicatrice’s left opened and Bonaparte took her eyes off him for a split-second.

“Shit, look out!” Price shouted, reaching out as though he could affect the course of events just through willpower alone.

But instead of going for the heavily- armed and armored Inquisitor, Cicatrice snapped up the five-year-old girl in her pajamas, with a stuffed rabbit in her hands, who had emerged from the bathroom.

“Santa?”

Price slapped his hand to his forehead.

“I live above fucking Cindy Lou Who.”

“Scar! Don’t touch her, Scar!” Bonaparte growled, holding out her hand as though trying to Force-choke him.

But it was too late. The little girl dangled in Cicatrice’s hands the same way the bunny rabbit dangled in her’s.

“Would you look at these awful people,” Cicatrice said, his voice distended into a rasp by his missing lips and half-wrecked voicebox, “all trying to hurt dear old Saint Nick.”

He leered at the little girl, his face an eyeless sodden mask of gurgling meat. The girl shrieked at the horrific visage, and from the room opposite her parents emerged. The father had a baseball bat in his hands, but seeing the scene of a walking museum display surrounded by highly armed SWAT teams, they hung back.

“Scar,” Bonaparte warned, not lowering her weapon.

“What?” Cicatrice rasped wetly, “I should have a heart? I should fret over the innocents? I’m aflame with hunger. And I have no time for your hypocrisy.” He dangled the girl in between himself and Bonaparte like a human shield. “You wouldn’t hesitate for a second to open fire on me.”

“What?” the mother cried out in anguish. “You’re cops! You can’t…”

The father put his arm around her waist and pulled her in tightly. Suddenly it couldn’t have been more obvious that the strange people in their home were not police.

“Don’t do it, Bonaparte,” Price whispered. If their roles were reversed he’d call the whole thing off, even if his life were forfeit, so long as Cicatrice let the girl walk away.

His nerves screamed at him, wondering how long it was going to take the rest of the Inquisitors to trample down the stairs to the lower apartment.

“You’re right,” Bonaparte agreed, “I won’t hesitate. The question is, if this is your last stand, if they tell stories of this after you’re gone, do you want them to say the last thing the most powerful vampire of all time did was drain a little girl when he was surrounded by armed Inquisitors?”

Cicatrice peered down into the petrified girl’s eyes, who now resembled a real rabbit more than her own stuffed one.