I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (5 page)

“Boone, man the fuck up! We got what we came
for. Let’s jet.”

Bowie shook Boone with the hand clasped on
his shoulder. Bowie figured the kid’s blood pressure was through
the roof because Boone’s face had turned a shade of crimson he’d
never seen outside of a crayon box.

“We out, Boone.”

Santa Anna was in the trailer with them, the
muzzle of his Ithaca on the four on the floor. “This one ain’t a
vamp.”

“Slave,” stated Bowie, pushing Boone past
him, the barrel of his Colt SMG locked on the tall vampire who
stood in the front of the RV.

“Boone…”

Boone stopped and turned. The thing with the
hat had whispered his name.

“You got it.” As he said it his chest swelled
again. He wanted to tear past Bowie and into the freak fuck.

“Kreshnik, right?”

The thing snarled and then said something in
a language Boone didn’t understand. Its voice was thick and
guttural with a hint of a sibilant lisp.

“This is America, asshole.” Boone locked eyes
with it again. “Speak American.”

Tires screeched outside.

Boone purposefully broke their gaze this time
and leaned down, grabbing one of the human beings who huddled on
the floor by her hair. She had been beautiful once, but now she was
worn and blanched, a willing slave to the undead. She hissed at him
but posed no danger.

“This one yours?” he called back to the tall
vampire as he scratched the woman’s face with the tip of his stake.
She screamed as though he had impaled her and shook uncontrollably,
a trickle of blood dripping down her cheek. Boone let her fall back
to the floor as the other three on the floor shuddered and cried
out in terror.

As everyone watched, Boone licked the woman’s
blood from the stake. He stuck his tongue out like he had tasted
feces and spit on the floor. “And you fuckers suck that shit out of
tampons, right?”

“Gentlemen, let’s put a little light to this
endeavor—” Gossitch had stepped up into the trailer, replacing
Santa Anna. He shouldered his Colt SMG and fired three round bursts
through the blackened windows, the glass shattering, weak sunlight
filtering in.

The tall vampire continued to stand where it
was as the wounded vampire and the three others screeched and
sought cover, crawling under overturned gurneys, yanking mattresses
and lab coats over themselves, one worming its way into some
floor-level cabinets. The cut woman cried hysterically, grasping
her face.

Bowie was out of the RV and Gossitch pulled
on Boone.

“Let’s go, kid.”

Boone straight armed the .44 and fired one
shot. The tall vampire didn’t flinch as the bullet zipped past its
head and blew out the windshield behind it in a hail of glass
shards.

Gossitch grabbed Boone by his arm and pulled
him out of the trailer, the horrendous sobs of the burned vampire
emanating from the cabinets where it had dragged itself.

Boone hopped into the back of the K-Car.
Gossitch was in the passenger seat as Santa Anna floored the
accelerator.

“We got it all?” Boone asked the men.

“The product, the money,” confirmed Santa
Anna.

“Got these for you, Goose.” Gossitch, turned
in the passenger seat, took the pack of Marlboros from Boone
without taking his eyes off the street behind them.

“We clear?” Santa Anna glanced in the rear
view.

“We clear,” said Gossitch.

They drove in silence for several blocks and
then Santa Anna turned the car into an alley that let out into a
rubble-strewn lot. The Pontiac was there already and Jay and
Hamilton were transferring cases to the van.

“Pop the trunk,” Gossitch told Santa Anna as
the Reliant pulled to a halt next to the van. Gossitch got out of
the K-Car with his SMG and walked back to the alley. Boone and
Santa Anna went to work unloading the trunk of their car into the
van.

Gossitch followed the passage and stood in
the rain near to where it let out into the street, keeping an eye
on the way they’d come. Vampires didn’t move about freely in the
daytime, but that wouldn’t stop them from sending their slaves…

As he watched the road, Gossitch reached into
his back pocket and took out his Marlboros. He lit one up. This
neighborhood was mostly deserted and anyone who could wouldn’t talk
to the cops. Around here, the police weren’t considered the good
guys. Around here vampires and other things preyed on the poor and
the weak, and when people complained no one listened to them. The
ones who listened didn’t believe them.

Gossitch knew better. He knew the stories,
the reality. He knew that where there was myth there was often some
kind of truth. He knew that myth could serve as the perfect cover,
an alibi. He knew that when a man or woman survived an encounter
with a beast of legend they couldn’t always rationally describe
what had happened to them, what they had seen.

The people here…society had dismissed them as
pariahs and leeches, abandoning them. Who really cared about them?
Gossitch knew why the vamps liked to prey on these men and women.
Who was going to notice if a few more homeless or hookers went
missing? They disappeared all the time and it rarely made the
papers.

Gossitch had to give the vamps credit. They’d
gotten more sophisticated in the last few years. They were getting
better at what they did. This whole blood collection scam for
instance. What an idea. Why kill humans or turn them to slaves when
you could keep them willingly coming back, time after time, none
the wiser? The vamps had plenty of cash on hand to pay volunteers,
and in a neighborhood like this there was never a shortage of
volunteers. Gossitch exhaled a plume of smoke and thought he had to
hand it to the vamps, there was a diabolical genius to their
idea.

A city bus passed a block down.

He knew the vamps had their own problems.
Civil war had thinned their ranks. The dissension that separated
clans was what allowed Gossitch and his crew to survive the way
they did. Play one side against another. Exploit them. Make a good
living from it, too. And thus far, knock on wood, they’d all been
able to walk away.

He could hear the men talking as they worked,
blowing off steam. A lot of tension and anxiety around a job, but
so far Gossitch’s track record spoke for itself. He had hand
selected these men and his choices had been solid.

“Goose, how’s it look?” Hamilton joined him
in the alley. He was a Guatemalan, his hair spiked up with gel.

“Quiet morning.”

“We good.” Hamilton nodded his head over his
shoulder back to the vehicles and other men.

“Let’s roll, Ham.” Gossitch tossed his
cigarette butt to the ground and followed Hamilton back to the van.
Madison was behind the wheel. Hamilton slid across the bench seat
next to him. Bowie, Boone, Santa Anna, and Jay were in back with
the merchandise.

They were all safe, reflected Gossitch. His
boys had all made it in one piece. He took great satisfaction in
this fact.

He slammed the passenger side door closed and
Madison put it in drive, pulling back down the alley and out onto
the street, the stolen K-car and Pontiac abandoned in the lot.

Gossitch thought about something Santa Anna
had said to him back in the Reliant, something about Boone.
Gossitch had meant what he’d said about wanting Boone by his side
if things went to hell. It had happened once or twice on a job, and
the only reason
any
of them had survived was because the kid
had been there. Boone was a valuable man to have on the crew,
Gossitch knew, but his value stemmed in part from his role as a
maverick, as something almost uncontrollable.

That shot at the vampire in the RV, for
example. Had the kid been meaning to cap the tall thing? Probably.
Boone was such a bad shot.

Gossitch wondered if it was all the
testosterone Boone put in his system to pump his muscles up. Maybe
it was the cocaine or whatever other recreational drugs the kid
snorted and smoked when he wasn’t on a job. Gossitch would never
work with a man whose head wasn’t on straight, but he ascribed to
the belief that after a job was over a man’s free time was a man’s
free time.

When it came to vampires or werewolves or any
one of another dozen varieties of nasties that inhabited the Big
Apple, Boone was ready to throw down on the get-go. And that was a
valuable quality in and of itself.

The crew chief didn’t think the kid had any
fear. None. It would have been a dangerous thing if the kid wasn’t
smart. But Gossitch knew, aside from having a set on him like a
pair of basketballs, Boone was shrewd enough, even calculating.

The kid had rammed the vampire through the
glass and hung it out there to burn. That had messed up all the
other vamps with the exception of the tall one. Gossitch made a
mental note to ask Raheem about that.

Truth was, Gossitch admitted it to himself,
the kid’s action had jarred him some too. There was an unknown
quantity with Boone, something of a sadistic streak. The kid could
have just as easily tossed the vamp out onto the sidewalk to fry.
Maybe he would have if Gossitch hadn’t been there.

And that thing with the girl…there was only
one fate left her now.

They robbed monsters. That’s how they made
their living. Gossitch did it for the money, not the thrill.
Gossitch suspected the kid did it for the thrill. The crew chief
knew Boone nurtured a special hatred for their non-human marks. It
was the way some white people Gossitch knew felt about blacks and
Hispanics. The kid hated monsters, all monsters, even the ones they
worked
with
.

Yeah
, thought Gossitch, maybe it was
all that testosterone in the kid’s system. Or maybe it was just
Boone’s warped brain chemistry.

Somewhere off in the dark, water dripped.

After three hundred and twenty six years of
existence, the dark Lord Rainford had grown fatigued in body and
mind.

This was nothing new.

He had grown dispirited and disillusioned
centuries ago. His end, he knew, would come in the next decades,
and he felt none of the anticipation or elation that others he
shared this earth with did for the coming of a new millennium. He
had seen the passage of centuries and realized that time, in the
sense of seconds and minutes and hours, of days and weeks and
months and years, was an arbitrary affair, an imposition of order
upon a seemingly haphazard universe.

Rainford might have felt pity for the humans,
their thoughts centered on the coming millennium, if he wasn’t
contemptuous of them. The millennium. Just another capricious
number. The humans. They had hunted Rainford’s kind down through
the centuries, through the millennia.

Drip
…
drip
…
drip
…

Now he felt annoyance at his own kind, those
who had beckoned him rise from his rest. There was weak daylight
outside the warehouse’s blackened and barred windows, and centuries
had acclimated Rainford to dormancy in the day. As one who had
spent hundreds of years hiding from the burning white orb, Rainford
had developed what he considered a healthy respect for solar
radiation. Even when he was safe and secure in his own redoubt, he
knew when the sun shone upon his portion of the earth.

It was the way of things, part of the deal.
This new generation of his kind, however, was challenging the
established order.

Not that Rainford considered himself a
conservative or a reactionary creature. Change in and of itself was
not to be feared. Rainford had embraced this city and the
cosmopolitan centers of western Europe, the best he felt humans had
to offer.

And thus it was that predilection, habit, and
nostalgia had driven him back to North America for what he
conceived of as his final years. He had been here for the
Independence. He had returned here after the excesses of the Terror
made France inhospitable. With the War Between the States he had
left again, and only a conflict the scale of which was unimaginable
to the minds of the men and women drove him from the Continent. The
poor fools had marched off to war in August of 1914 and thought
they’d be back in their homes by Christ’s Mass. More than fifteen
million of them never returned.

Rainford was content to live out the rest of
his days in a city he had watched grow. From a former Dutch colony
to the center of English political and military operations against
the patriots, to a jungle of concrete and steel structures seeking
to outbid Babel in their reach to the heavens, Manhattan and its
sister boroughs had afforded Rainford and his kind the protection
of anonymity amid millions. It also provided an abundant and ready
food supply.

So, feeling the weight of his years and
travails, Rainford had repaired to New York for what he conceived
of as his dotage. Here he was largely unknown, even to his own
kind, unless he chose to reveal himself. To those to whom he was
known, he was feared. The mere mention of his name, or the name of
his brother and sister, was enough to produce fear and respect in
the cognoscenti. The cognoscenti, those in the know, though there
were fewer and fewer of them these days.

The younger generations of his kind, lamented
Rainford, had no sense of history. Either of their own or the
history of the species they lived symbiotically with. Which went
far in explaining how children of the night could war on one
another amidst a world that would see them all dead.

But Rainford was not allowed to remain alone.
They—the Europeans—had sent their envoys. Rainford had wanted
nothing to do with them, but to turn these visitors back was to
risk a confrontation that would ultimately prove detrimental to all
concerned. Better to do what was asked, and in time the interlopers
would return from whence they came, and Rainford would be left with
his port and his books to while out the remainder of his days.