Drew D'Amato:Bloodlines:02 (26 page)

“
Keep your guns pointed on him and wait for him to awake, anything now will be a waste.”

Roberto aimed the gun at Vlad’s chest.  The red laser went right in the middle of the vest between the
blocks of useless C-4.  A
silver bullet
then
followed right after the laser sight.  He fired into his heart, direct hit. 

Bandini looked at him, frustrated.

“Worth a try
,” Roberto said
.

“Just wait,” ordered Bandini.

4

V
lad had been on this ride before, but then he actually thought it was death.  However, this time was different.  Last time it was all black, hot, and felt like he moved downward, toward the heat.  Now what he felt was soft, and he was surrounded by white light and a feeling of ascension. 
Did this mean something? 
He did not want to think of that now.  Now he braced himself for when he would be pulled back.  It happened like a snap.  Last time he felt like he was going back up, this time he felt like he was coming back down.  He knew what would be next.

He lay on the Confession floor.  He felt the warm blood soak his back.  He did not open his eyes, but let his other senses do the work.  He had them back, his vampire ones.  He could tell by the sounds of breathing, and the smell of humans, that the Crusaders were looking down at him from over the Baldacchino.  They were waiting for him to respond with their guns drawn.  Then he heard someone moving away from the Baldacchino. 

“Men, be prepared for some action from outside.  There are more of his men around here,” Bandini said.

Vlad heard the sound of guns cocking and Bandini walking off the Baldacchino.  Seven men started to make their way out of the Basilica to look for anyone suspicious out in St. Peter’s Square.  Still he could tell there were a few men with their guns aimed at him.  He wasn’t worried about them, he had his
insurance. 
Underneath his bomb vest were two Heckler and Koch MP5K’s strapped to his back loaded with silver bullets—just in case the Crusaders had decided to drink the blood before their meeting—and a hand grenade on his belt. 

He pulled the pin first.  He had his vampire speed back and for a moment was amazed at the speed he threw the grenade up at the Baldacchino.  The four Crusaders instinctively ducked out of the way.  Roberto managed to get a shot off, but his aim was bad.  He was distracted
ducking the grenade.  The grenade exploded within the Baldacchino, killing the four Crusaders.  Two died instantly, one lost an arm and a leg and bled out. Roberto avoided the initial explosion but the columns of the Baldacchino gave out and the canopy came down, crushing his skull into pieces.
The Baldacchino
was on fire.  The Baldacchino
from the seventeenth century that became a tourist attraction and a stron
g sign of the Catholic faith had been destroyed. 
Two of the columns still stood, the other two fell
out
.  The canopy for the most part
was
still
just
one big piece,
the same could not be said for Roberto’s brain. 

Vlad
rose
out of
the Confession
, and the smoke of the explosion created an image
like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. 
In the chaos, Vlad took off the vest of C-4, dropping it into the Confession, and unholstered his two small
MP5K’s
.   

The seven who almost made it out of the Basilica turned around.  Floating in th
e air at about the height of where the
Baldacchino
was,
hung
Vlad
.  The Crusaders shot their silver bullets back at Vlad but to no avail.  He dodged the bullets like
he was dodging a beach ball
.  He shot
and killed two more—one from each gun—that were right below him.

He did a back
flip in the air over the Baldac
chino.  The remaining Crusaders
, now
fifteen
, followed after him, guns blazing with no respect for the priceless relics in the room.  Vlad had
no respect for anything in the room
.  He flew back to St. Peter’s chair
and sat in it, watching the Crusaders with amusement
.

The Crusaders aimed and fired.  Four shots hit him center mast.  He laughed and ripped open his shirt to reveal a bullet-proof vest.  Vlad laughed at them.

“After Geneva I knew you idiots didn’t use armor-piercing bullets.  My turn.”

Without even moving from the chair Vlad killed eight men, four from each gun.  It was like a kid playing a first-person shooter video game.  He just aimed and squeezed the trigger. 
He ran out of rounds.  He took out two more magazines and loaded one gun after the other, while he looked at the seven survivors giving them a stare that meant certain death.

The
remaining
Crusaders stood
at the edge of the Confession next to the burning
Baldacchino.
  Their guns were aimed and they stared through the flames at Vlad.  He sat there at the back of the Basilica, in St. Peter’s chair, with his legs folded.  He relo
aded his guns while he sat.
 
Their weapons were useless, his heart was protected.
 
When Vlad’s guns were loaded he rose above the chair.

The belief was that t
he Holy Spirit hovered over the chair, but not now.  Now th
ere was nothing but a vampire
.  The seven Crusaders focused on him floating there,
and
then a little voice in
side
their heads talk
ed
.  The voice told them they
had
pi
ssed off the wrong vampire.  The voice told them,
run.

“You will all die in the house of your God,” Vlad guaranteed them
.

The Crusaders all knew they had no fight left.  The group tried to make an escape
t
o t
he Hall of Ligorio, but they wouldn’t make it that far.  Vlad flew at them shooting at the scared
mass of red robes
as they ran. 

Vlad had managed to kill four of them before they even got to leave the Basilica
, easy shots to the back of the head
.  The other three started to make it through the hallway to The Sistine Chapel.  Vlad nailed the fifth one before he got a chance to turn the corner of the hall
with a bullet in the eye
.  The murals and artwork on the wa
lls did not register in any of t
he Crusader’s minds, just death following
after
them, and
death
was getting close.
             

There was just
Bandini
and another
left. 
The other one fell
.  Bandini
,
the great leader and man he was
,
did not wait for him.  Vlad in an instant dropped his guns and grabbed
the other Crusader
from the back of his neck.  He bit his fangs into the back of the top of
the
Crusader’s
skull.  The back corner of the skull
, which is
usually the fi
rst part of the head to go bald
like it was for this man, Vlad used as a target.
  With stren
gth he never had before he scalped the man from the back with just
his teeth. 

Vlad grabbed the brain out of his mouth and ripped the rest of it out of the top of the skull.  The eyes fell out of the body when they disconnected from the optic nerve.  Vlad held the brain and the spinal cord out in front of him. 
I’m stronger that I was before,
Vlad thought to himself which was the reason he tried such a macabre experiment.

Bandini
had seen all of it, the whole act.  He just froze there urinating down his leg, but his piss did not smell as bad
as the dead Crusader’s feces.  Bandini had
not even notice
d
they had just entered The Sistine Chapel.

“
Is there anymore Blood, anymore Crusaders?” Vlad asked using his mind control to get an honest answer from Bandini.

“No, I am all that is left, just me, no more Blood.  Some Crusaders not as high up as us are around, but they did not know anything about tonight.  Please let me live so I can tell the world about you.” 

“The world does not need to know about me.  There will be no more vampires in a few days.”

“Please, let the world know what happened to Judas, give them the proof they need for their faith.”

“When you have faith you don’t need proof.  That was why Judas never came forth all those years.  You really don’t understand how this battle of good versus evil works.  Men like you will destroy your faith.  Make it nothing more than something sure to believe in like gravity.  That is not what your Lord wants, it is what
you
want.”

“Please, have mercy, if you are good, you will be merciful.”

“Again you don’t understand.  Good defeats evil, good is not merciful to evil.  And you Bandini, are one evil, selfish son of a bitch.”

Vlad grabbed Bandini by his robe.  Bandini
started to cry. 
Vlad threw him over the gate wall preventing entry into the Chapel that was about ten feet high.  Bandini landed on his back looking up at the
ceiling of
Sistine Chapel, just like Michelangelo did
,
but under better circumstances.  The bones in his back cracked as he landed.  He had broken three of them.

Vlad floated over the fence and landed right in front of Bandini.  He grabbed Bandini and the two of them flew to the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel.  The ceiling of the chapel had nine paintings from the book of Genesis going in chronological order from the back
altar
wall of the chapel to the entrance. 
The paintings rotated in size with the odds ones all a smaller size, and the larger even ones between them—five small, four big. The paintings were also in
order from the creation o
f the heavens up to Noah drunk and disgraced. 
Vlad held Bandini by his
collar and rose to the murals of
the ceiling banging Bandini’s head against
the sixth painting in the order. 

“Let’s start here,
” Vlad said.  “T
he Expulsion from Paradise.  I know what this is like.  I just experience
d
this.  They were kicked out because they were sinners, but that was not why I had t
o leave my paradise.  But y
our Crusader paradise of doing whatever you want to
whoever is over.  You are a sinner, and you are expulsed
.”

Vlad flew him
backward toward the altar wall.  He skipped the painting of the creation of Eve and went over to the next big one.  He hit Bandini’s head against the
painting on the ceiling
again, this time leaving a small crack
.

“The C
reation of Adam, see the way their fingers touch.  God made you in paradise, but all you men want to do is sin.  I was created by the damned, yet for s
ome reason I’m more righteous tha
n you.  Well I guess we’ll let the man upstairs, your God, decide who is the better of us.  I just know which one of us is fucked.”

Vlad took him down to the next big paint
ing in the order, skipping the Separation of Land and W
ater and went to the one after that.  He hit the back of Bandini’s head again on the next painting drawing some b
lood from the back of his skull that stained the artwork.

“The C
rea
tion of the Sun, Moon, and P
lanets.  Well I don’t know about the planets, but I sure as shit think that after that hit you’re seeing some stars.”

Vlad flew him back to the last painting at the end of the ceiling
, a smaller one
.   Bandini’s head hit on it
and now more blood was
painted on Michelangelo’s masterpiece, right on the face of God in this painting.  Vlad stuck out his tongue and licked t
he blood off the painting
over the Lord’s face.

“
Do you know this
painting
?
‘And God said let there be light.’  Well you son of a bitch, I’m going to show you the light.  The brightest fucking light yo
u’ll ever see.
”

Bandini finally got his motor nerves to start to work again in his body.  He spoke, “I was only doing the Lord’s work.”

“You don’t even understand His work.
”