Vampire Apocalypse: Descent Into Chaos (Book 2) (27 page)

There was a loud explosion to his left and the
chatter of machine gun fire erupted. The thralls were still
fighting over the border but it really had no bearing on the
overall outcome. Whichever vampire was triumphant would have little
trouble decimating the forces that were left. The thralls would
obey whichever vampire was in control. He turned away from the
noises and shut them from his mind. He had another trap to set.

Harris looked out over the square. As Dee had
reported earlier the cage now filled the entire town square and
there were nearly a thousand humans by his reckoning held in the
prison. The cage was a very temporary affair, and so large that the
thralls had not used walls at all in many cases but instead had
used the buildings around the square itself to complete the prison.
There were lines of fencing strung between these buildings to
complete the closed in structure. It would be a simple matter of
breaking a window or even opening a door to get out of the prison,
but none of the glassy-eyed humans in the cage were capable of
doing even that to save themselves. He felt anger boil through him
as he watched two thralls laugh as a group of humans walked
repeatedly into a door in a vain effort to escape, each of them
aware how close salvation was but completely incapable of simply
turning the handle.

There was no room for any trucks in the square itself
so they would have to get their charges to walk quite a distance to
the waiting vehicles. That complicated matters as it was like
herding sheep, and not something that you wanted to be doing if you
had thralls shooting at you. They had come in one truck and
Sherman, Flemming and Mitchell had all gone to see if they could
liberate some more transport. He knew he could not take all the
humans in the cage but he was going to take as many as he could. If
they could get a few more trucks then they could squeeze nearly
twenty people into each, pathetically few, he knew, but if there
was any other way he couldn’t think of it.

The vampires were really escalating things without
any thought to the future. If they used the number of humans here
to sustain them during the fighting then they would not have enough
food to carry them through the next few months unless they found a
new supply. He had never known the vampires to do anything without
extensive planning. Their very existence over the last few
centuries demanded such preparation. It seemed that Pat’s theory
was on the money. Something was definitely changing them.

He checked his ammunition pouch, counting the
magazines and ensuring that the ones marked with red tape were
within easy access. They would use normal ammunition on the thralls
but, for the vampires, they had Pat’s special bullets. These
bullets were still in short supply because each one had to be
individually coated in the extract that Pat had developed and then
re-loaded in to the magazines. It was a time consuming process, and
one that was becoming more and more difficult to get a resource for
with the changing priorities back at base.

Harris and his men had had to coat and pack their own
ammunition for tonight’s raid, and the six magazines he had seemed
pathetically few in light of the number of vampires that would be
abroad tonight. Hopefully, they would be too busy killing each
other to notice them, though the way things were going, recently,
it probably wouldn’t be that easy.

There were five thralls in the square, and at his
signal all five would die with a bullet in their brains. He
hesitated another moment as he surveyed the square. Once they
started there was no going back. He jumped as a large explosion
filled the night. They were still at it then. Good. He hoped that
they kept killing each other all night. That way they might remain
undisturbed. He raised his hand and a moment later the five thralls
collapsed to the ground.

It had begun.

Sherman held up his hand to hold the others in
position. The motor pool was outside of town, moved there obviously
for easy access to the border for the ongoing conflict. The main
force was already engaged in frantic fighting about two miles away
but there was a command post with at least twenty thralls in the
camp doing various chores from patrolling to moving or fixing
equipment.

Too many for them to take out without a fire fight,
and any such activity so close to the border would only run the
risk of attracting reinforcements. On the bright side he could see
over fifteen vehicles in the pool—obviously these were the ones
used to transport the humans to the front. Some had obviously been
sent back to get more supplies as there was no way a thousand
humans could have been transported so quickly in so few
vehicles.

There was also a train, still hissing and spitting
steam like an exhausted dragon, toward the back of the camp. Trains
were still used for transport in many states, but the more modern
diesel and electric trains were now only used for scrap. Steam had
made a comeback. With plenty of trees available for their
insatiable appetites and, with no bleeding hearts around to warn of
global warming, the thralls merely chopped the trees that were
handiest along their route.

The train was old, more like a museum piece, but it
obviously still worked. The cars that it pulled, however, looked
more like something from a western movie. They were made from
wooden slates on an iron bed and contained no seats at all. They
had obviously been used to transport livestock before the vampires
had come, maybe a long time before they had come Sherman
amended—say around the late 1800s—and it seemed that that was
exactly what they had been used for now. The captive humans could
be packed into those cars, almost two hundred in each car if they
really packed them in. It would be freezing, of course, but they
would survive.

Harris had briefly considered using trains before but
they were far too big. It didn’t help that they sent a huge plume
of smoke into the air like a giant finger pointing to their
position. On the other hand, they did take a lot of passengers.

Sherman lay on the cold ground as the snow fell
around him and ran through a number of scenarios. He was aware of
the other two shifting nervously beside him and blowing constantly
on their exposed fingers, but he ignored them. A track ran from
here all the way to their own base—at least, it went to within ten
miles their camp. They used it themselves as a navigational tool,
many times. If they took this train they couldn’t just park it
close to their base, but there was a fairly large train station
only twenty or so miles away where they could keep the train under
cover of the huge station roof. Once it cooled down no one would be
the wiser.

It would be crazily dangerous, of course, but it was
just the kind of mad scheme Harris would love. And just the kind of
thing that might just get him killed. They could still use the
trucks to get a smaller number out but they could use the train to
take the majority. Of course, he would lead the trucks and slip
away quietly while Harris could take all the chances with that
noisy behemoth.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to kill him, after all.
Sherman pulled back from the edge and began to lay out his plan to
the others.

Falconi watched the vampires arrive from Von Kruger’s
side of the border and watched in amazement as the dark figures
swooped, gauged and tore at each other at amazing speeds. He found
it almost impossible to track them with his binoculars but he could
see enough to know that his worst fears had been realized.

He had hoped that there might be a brief battle, and
that they would come to their senses after Wentworth had had his
revenge for Von Kruger’s unprovoked attack on his thralls. But that
had not happened. Wentworth’s vampires had torn Von Kruger’s
thralls to pieces all along the border and then Von Kruger’s
vampires had arrived and now hundreds of bodies lay strewn about
like so many rag dolls.

It had gone way too far now for there to be any other
result than full and total annihilation of one side. The vampires
fought each other in the air and on the ground but the decimated
forces of the thralls, those still alive at least, tried vainly to
scramble out of their way. Many were snatched and sucked dry as the
vampires needed more and more blood to heal from their horrendous
wounds. This was the moment he needed. The first phase of the
vampire attack was winding down and Wentworth had scored a huge
victory. Now was the time to drive home the advantage before they
could recover.

He shouted orders to his men and there was a flurry
of activity as men picked up equipment, started engines and formed
ranks. He would have to leave most of his tanks behind as he did
not have the fuel for them, but still his organized forces should
easily be able to handle what was left of the enemy thrall
forces.

It wasn’t as if many of them had survived the vampire
attack.

Carter watched the enemy thrall forces move
relentlessly closer. They stretched out over almost a mile of
border so, while they looked impressive, there was little substance
behind the first two ranks of men. They had little or no heavy
armor either. From his vantage point he could only see three tanks
and two of them were too far away to pose any problems for now,
though he would have to keep an eye on them.

He had organized his forces in three heavily manned
phalanxes that allowed him to concentrate his firepower on one
point. This type of focused attack, on a point where the enemy was
spread thinly, would allow him to punch right through them and come
at them from behind before they knew what was happening. There was
one tank coming directly towards them, though and he had sent a
team with their only remaining explosives to take it out. The tank
was running slightly ahead of its support forces and it should give
his men the time needed to lay in wait in a hollow, fix the
explosives and get out before it blew. Of course, whether they got
away or not was not really his concern. Blowing the tank was his
only worry.

He had placed his flame-throwers at each end-point of
his forces and slightly forward. The bulk of his forces lay prone
and hidden behind the darkness and the smoke that swirled across
the battlefield. Fires still lit large areas in pulsing flashes but
he had placed his men as far from these as he could. He had also
ordered as many bodies dragged into the area in front of them as
possible so the enemy would assume that there had been few
survivors. He would let the thralls come deep into his trap before
he opened fire, and then the flame-throwers would seal his trap
from the rear.

His main problem was ammunition. He simply did not
have enough to kill all of the soldiers that were approaching. Von
Kruger should be here soon with the bulk of his forces but he would
be far too busy to help, even if he was bothered to do so. What he
needed was a diversion, something to make the enemy commander split
his forces. Unfortunately miracles were rare for the forces of
evil.

Sherman finished planting the explosives and
retreated back to the meeting point. He was taking a big risk but
he hoped that the main forces would be too busy to react. They had
planted explosives along the far end of the motor pool and close to
the command camp. He always was a believer than if you cut off the
head, that the body would run around without any cohesive strategy
for quite some time before somebody organized a response. In that
window he hoped to put his plan into effect.

They would take two trucks to Harris in the centre of
town and Flemming would drive the train. They had lucked out a
little on that. He had overheard two thralls talking about the
train going back out tonight to pick up more humans so its
departure would not raise any undue attention. Their only problem
lay in knowing when exactly it was due to leave. The last thing
they wanted was the real driver running after the departing train
and raising the alarm.

If he didn’t come soon then they would have to leave
without him and hope that the resulting confusion was sufficient to
keep its departure from the thrall’s notice. The explosives were
set to go off in ten minutes so they had that long. Flemming was
confident he could handle the old engine, and he was busy stoking
the furnace at this very moment.

Nine minutes.

Flemming straightened his back and wiped the sweat
from his face. God, it’s hot, he thought as the heat blasted from
the furnace. He kicked the door closed and ran his eyes over the
controls. He had told Sherman that he could handle the train, but
its controls seemed far more complex now that he was looking at
them. He had driven a train before, one of the diesels that his
uncle had worked on. It had been years ago, a lifetime, it felt
like, but it had been fairly simple. There was a knack to easing
the power into the wheels as you released the brake slowly but he
had been confident that he could do it. But the controls that faced
him now did not look anything like those he had used before.

He was fairly certain he had found the brake but he
could not find how to drive the power from the furnace into the
wheels. There were countless dials, and all of them hovered
dangerously around the red marks on their glass-fronted gauges. He
had to release the pressure soon or the whole thing would blow with
far more force than the explosives they had planted.

Eight minutes.

“What’s he waiting for,” Sherman muttered as he
watched the train continue to spit steam but remain stubbornly
motionless. He scanned the area around him but none of the guards
seemed to be paying him any mind as he sat in the truck with the
engine idling. “If that fucker doesn’t move that train in the next
thirty seconds I’m going to tear his balls off.”