Drew D'Amato:Bloodlines:02 (9 page)

“Get him,” Vlad whispered.  Michael pulled out his
gun with the silencer and shot
the vampire in the heart.  The fledg
l
ing dissolved into nothing,

“Let’s move on,” Michael said.

Malachi and
Andrew
kneeled down to do the same thing.  The vampire died also, another
random Raduson
.

“We could be here all day,” Malachi said.

“
Well, we have all day
,” Vlad said to him as he and Michael walked de
eper into the basement
. 

Th
e act became a game of grab bag;
pull out a vampire, sh
oot him, and move on until you got the
lucky one.  Each pair of vampires wanted to be the group that wiped out the big guy, except for Michael. 
Michael’s mind was racing. 
What happened to Radu? 
Was this an even
bigger trap and maybe Radu just didn’t care about these vampires dying—about Michael dying?  Is this house maybe rigged with explosions, or something else as destructive?

Vlad and Michael
pulled out a vampire already awake.  It was Victor, one of Radu’s closest. 
He screamed at first as
Vlad
held a clump of his hair.

“
Michael
get him!”
Vlad
said.

Michael didn’t know what to do.  Victor was awake. 
Was this part of the trap? 
His hesitation allowed the vampire to
wail his hands as a form of a fight.  He hit
Vlad
’s hand and his gun fell from him.  Then he punched
Michael
in the stomach.  As he keeled over from the blow something fell out of his jacket
.  Michael didn’t notice it
.  The vampire put his hands on the ground and popped out of the dirt, like someone getting out of a built-in pool at the shallow end.  Before he could make a
n
escape he reacted to
being
shot in the back and disappeared
.  Jericho
lowered his
smoking
gun.

“Do I have to
do everything for you?” Jericho
said.

“He wasn’t sleeping
,”
Michael
said
more to himself than anyone else
.

“Maybe he had sleep apnea, get back to work,” Vlad said.

Sweat started to form a thick film on Michael’s skin.  Michael had his eyes on Vlad, but what if Jericho and Malahci pulled out Radu and killed him?  It was only a matter of time until
something had to happen. 
Either Radu killed Vlad or someone killed Radu.  Until then, Michael was stuck in this limbo of having to play it cool.  His stress would end soon enough, though.  Vlad had discovered Radu.

At the
north
end of the cave
,
two blue rocks stood about ten feet up in the air.  Between the
se
two rocks
,
a silver coffin s
tood three feet in the air held up by
two poles at
each end
.

“That’s got to be him,” Vlad said.  Vlad and Michael started the
ir approach
.

3

J
ericho and
Deacon
were about to pull out
another vampire. 
As he bent down
Jericho
noticed something on the ground
.  He
inspected it.  It was Michael’s cell phone.
He grabbed it and
accidentally hit the SMS button
. 
The last text was blank and sent to an unfamiliar number.  The number started with 011—it was international.  What was stranger was the time sent—9:09—right before they entered Radu’s house.  Then he looked at the number after the 011—the country code number—it was 40. 

40
was
Romania!

4

V
lad and Michael got to the casket.  It was a heavy casket but not too heavy for a vampire
to open
.  Vlad
started to flip
open
the top half of the casket.  As the adrenaline surged
through Vlad’s body, Michael
’s nerves were
worse.  He knew something big was about to happen.
 
The
red
velvet li
ned casket
opened and there
la
y
Radu
, sleeping like a baby.  He slept face-
up
and
his hands over
the opposite shoulder, like someone doing a pencil dive.
  He was in the nocturnal vampire’s deep rest; the acti
on of the casket opening w
ould not wake him up.

But is he really sleeping? 
Michael wondered.  Did they get the days mixed up?  If that is true then what did he do now?  Did nocturnal vampires
have
to sleep during the day?  Then why would Radu even agree to this plan?   

No, he could be awake.  The other vampire was up.  The trap was set, they were invited in, but what was their plan? 
Vlad slowly put his gun over Radu’s chest
,
pointing it straight down
over his heart
. 
His r
ight hand squeez
ed
the handle and the left
hand
aim
ed
the barrel. 
He didn’t rush it like he did with the other ones in the dirt.  Either for the emotional reasons, or the sake that he did not want to screw up such a perfect chance, he took his time.  Part of Vlad couldn’t believe he was actually doing this. 

In that second Michael solved this riddle.  Gabriel told Michael that if Vlad got too close, to take him out.  This was his test.  He wasn’t told that Radu wanted to kill him, just that he wanted to
see
Vlad die.  What better seat would he have than right now, and the way Vlad would die—betrayal—what was a better way than that?  This was Radu’s plan, but Michael had to act fast, he had to—

BANG!

Michael disappeared into nothing.  Vlad turned instinctively to the shot, before killing Radu. 
He saw just the outline of Jericho in the darkness about ten yards back
with a smoking gun in his right hand.

“IT’S A TRAP! KILL RADU NOW!”

Too late.  Radu jumped out of the coffin and knocked Vlad’s gun out of his hand.  B
ullets started to fly
from the opposite side of the room, and they did not come from a
gun with a silencer on it.  Gabriel had appeared out of God knows where
,
with an M-60 machine gun and fired at the
m
. 
Andrew
and Malachi ran to avoid the bullets and
hid behind some
blue rocks.  Vlad got behind one of the two big rocks in front of the c
offin
.  Jericho
ran up
behind the other one. 
Deacon
was killed
in the melee
. 

Gabriel
hid behind a rock himself
. 
Vlad’s men
shot back at the small repeating fire, but it sounde
d like they were just hitting hard rock.  The onslaught did not stop
.
  Vampires shot out of the dimples like canisters up through a pneumatic tube.  Most of them were armed.

“Fuck, I’m glad I brought this thing,” Malachi said as he took the Milkor MGL grenade launcher off his shoulder.  He fired off three quick rounds, and in the small room it decimated a large portion of vampires, but they were still coming.  He fired two more rounds in Gabriel’s direction but he just hit blue rocks.  He didn’t kill Gabriel, but he got him to ease up on his shooting.

“Men, get up here,” Vlad yelled to Malachi and Andrew when there was a break in the action.

Malachi and Andrew ran behind the two large stones Jericho and Vlad were at.

“Where the fuck is Radu, no one went upstairs?” Malachi asked when he got behind the two stones.

“I don’t know,” Vlad said, and then the wall behind them slid open.

The four of them came face to face with Radu standing behind a glass wall.  Andrew, Jericho, and Vlad fired with their M4s at the glass, but the bullets just bounced off it.  It was bulletproof.  Malachi was about to shoot his grenade launcher, when Jericho put his hand on the barrel of the gun to stop him.

“No, you shoot that, the grenade will bounce off the glass and come back at us,” Jericho said.

Radu smiled from behind the glass.  “You see Vlad, thanks to your boy’s tip-off I was able to prepare for just such an emergency.  I got my own panic room,” Radu said from behind the glass.

He then opened a slit in the glass about the height of his waist, two feet wide and six inches high.  Radu moved to his side, away from the hole.  When he moved away, they saw that Radu had stood in front of a large machine gun—an NSV.  It was an anti-aircraft machine gun.  The gun stood up on a tripod and Radu sat behind it.  The space he had opened would allow the bullets of the gun to fire into the basement.

“We’re dead,” Jericho said, turning his head between Radu to the north of them, and Gabriel to their south.  More vampires were getting out of the dimples.  Jericho shot them with his M4 as they made their way out. 

“We’d be dead if we were humans, but we have our powers,” Vlad said.  “Men, push these two rocks down, transform into bats and make for the ceiling.”

“When?” Malachi asked. 

Radu cocked back the large gun.

“Now!”

In a sudden move they pushed the rocks down and changed into bats.  Radu opened fire and mowed down most of his own army, before he realized and stopped shooting.

“Gabriel, find them!” Radu ordered.

Gabriel moved his gun focused on the west side of the cave.  It was the only place they could have gone.  Radu could not aim his gun that far to the right, because of the small size of the hole in the glass.  Gabriel scanned the room and then heard the sound of someone banging on the door to upstairs. 

He looked up the stairs and saw Andrew trying to open the door.  Radu had locked the door wirelessly from his panic room.  It was now locked and made of titanium.  Andrew would not be able to get past it.  Gabriel fired upon him and he disappeared.

“Radu, I think they have the power to transform.  No human has walked past me, but this fucker was up the stairs.”

Andrew had taken this risk for the sake of the team.  It cost him his life.

“The rest of them are probably to my right, to the west, transformed into scared little bats,” Radu said. 

More vampires got out of the dimples.  The size of the army seemed endless.  The Radusons moved toward the west wall.  They made out a bat or two flapping its wings near the ceiling.  Then one bat dropped to the ground and transformed into Malachi, who stood there holding the Milkor in his hands.

“Hahlo Sunshine,” he said in a bad English accent with a large smile. 

He pressed the trigger and shot the last grenade in the gun toward the ceiling of the basement.  The explosion rocked the roof.  The front lawn above them caved in.  Dirt, grass and debris fell everywhere.  The hole reached right up to the panic room that was directly under the mansion proper.  The sunlight affected the vampires like acid had just flooded the room.  They disappeared within seconds.

Gabriel was trapped at the top of the stairs.  If he left the stairs and went back into the basement, the sun would burn him.  He was no longer a risk.  There was now just Radu, alone in his panic room.  The sunlight fell a few feet short of the window to this room.  He watched Malachi climb up a blue rock and jump up to the opening of the large hole.  He grabbed the ground above him and pulled himself out of the crater.  Radu fired the NSV at Malachi as he climbed out, but he couldn’t get his aim that far right.  He started to hit the glass and the bullets richocheted back inside the panic room.  He stopped firing, afraid he would kill himself. 

Jericho climbed on the same blue rock Malachi had used to get out, and again Radu could not get his gun to aim far enough right in his direction.  Jericho and Malachi were both standing on the front lawn.  Vlad was already up there waiting for them.

“Master, how did you get up here so fast?” Jericho asked.

“I turned human as soon as the sunlight came in, and in the split second of transforming between bat and man, I was able to catch onto the edge of the crater and pull myself up.”

“You are quick.” Malachi said.

“Yes, now Malachi, do you have more grenades for that thing?”