Vampire Apocalypse: A World Torn Asunder (Book 1) (17 page)

Chapter 16

Warkowski made his way through
the city. The streets were deserted, but he kept to the shadows as
much as possible. The sounds of battle raged behind and each
gunshot, each scream, tore at him. He didn’t like leaving his
position, letting his new friends down, but to be so close to Sarah
and Jill and to do nothing was unbearable.

Jill was only nine years old,
their pride and joy. Her long fair hair reached down to her waist,
despite her many efforts to train it into curls. Warkowski could
still see her pretty little face scrunched up, her lips beginning
to tremble, as she removed the rollers in the morning only to have
any curls fall out. Her hair remained stubbornly straight. She was
the image of her mother, the same high cheekbones and deep blue
eyes that Warkowski had fallen in love with ten years before when
he had first met Sarah.

“I’m coming, Sarah,” he
whispered and continued resolutely to their old apartment.

Dawn was beginning to take hold
on the city when Warkowski turned the corner into the street. He
could see the window to their old apartment and his heart thundered
in his chest.

Are they here? Are they alive?
The thoughts raced around his head, consumed him, and he picked up
the pace. His stomach tied itself in knots and he broke into a run.
He was so intent on the building that he didn’t notice the patrol
until he literally crashed into the first thrall.

The two men tumbled to the
ground. Warkowski was totally unprepared for the impact and he felt
the air rush from his body when he fell across the thrall. He lay
on the ground and sucked air, trying to feed his starved lungs. The
thrall recovered quickly and sprang back to his feet with a
nimbleness that belied his rather portly physique.

“Look what we have here.” The
thrall directed his comment at someone out of Warkowski's field of
vision. “We don’t need that,” he said indicating the machine gun,
“let’s have a bit of fun.”

“But the alarm, we have to go,”
the second thrall complained.

“Don’t worry; this’ll only take
a minute.” With that he planted a kick into Warkowski's ribs that
lifted him clear off the ground and sent him sprawling against an
abandoned car. Warkowski felt a rib break and pain shot through his
body. His vision blurred and then he felt himself being lifted by
the thrall. “These humans are so frail,” the thrall laughed.

Warkowski coughed up all the
phlegm he could muster and spat into the thrall’s face. The spit
was laced with blood. He looked up at the window of his apartment.
So close, he thought, and then he was flying across the street
again. He landed on his face and scraped the skin against the road.
Cuts opened all along his cheek and he felt himself lose
consciousness.

The thrall laughed and
approached him again. Warkowski pressed against the area around his
broken rib to make the pain act as an anchor. His head cleared. He
watched the thrall approach and steeled himself for one last
effort. The second thrall followed the first tentatively, but
stayed some ten feet behind.

“Peters, we really have to go.
Hammond will feed our guts to the hounds if we don’t report back.”
Warkowski listened to the second thrall complain and nearly laughed
that the fearsome brute should have such an ordinary name.

“Relax. Look, he’s begging now.”
The thrall laughed again and pointed at Warkowski as the man made
his way to his knees. “Should I put him out of his misery?”

As the thrall came closer,
Warkowski allowed himself to fall forward, pleading and using the
thrall’s clothes to scramble up. The thrall went to brush the
pleading human away, but Warkowski slipped a grenade from his belt,
pulled the pin and stuffed the explosive down the thrall’s open
shirtfront. The thrall looked quizzically at the human for a
moment, and then blanched when Warkowski showed him the pin on his
finger.

The thrall started a comic
dance, stuffing his arms into his fatigues and trying desperately
to get at the grenade. His companion looked totally confused, and
in that moment of indecision Warkowski struck. He launched himself
from the first thrall and ripped his knife from its scabbard. Even
with its superior speed the thrall was taken by surprise when
Warkowski rammed the knife through his neck and up into his
brain.

The blood spurted everywhere
after Warkowski pulled the knife from the wound and threw himself
to the ground. He rolled as fast as he could away from the two
thralls. The creature he had stabbed fell like a brick to the
ground and lay unmoving. The second thrall still gyrated as he
tried to locate the grenade. Warkowski rolled and rolled, the pain
in his side secondary to his survival instinct. The explosion, when
it came, was loud and very messy. Warkowski glanced back and saw
the thrall’s lower torso still standing in the middle of the road.
The upper part, however, was splattered over the entire street.

“That’s the problem with these
bastards,” Warkowski quipped, “one little rejection and they fall
to pieces.”

Warkowski felt as if each step
he took toward the building stuck a knife into his side. The door
was locked, of course. He spent a further few minutes kicking the
door until it finally gave way and slammed against an internal
wall. Glass shattered with the force and littered the floor of the
foyer.

“Three floors,” he muttered as
he looked at the stairwell in despair, “why couldn’t we have lived
on the ground floor?” He gritted his teeth and began the long,
painful climb. On the second floor landing he slumped against the
wall and looked at his watch, shocked to see that he had taken
seven minutes to climb this far. He was now about five minutes
behind schedule and knew he’d be a lot later by the time he got the
girls out in his condition. He pushed himself away from the wall
and continued his climb.

When he finally reached the door
to his apartment he hesitated. All his doubts, fears and dreams
crashed into him with a physical force that made him stagger. The
last few weeks of worry about his family had affected him badly.
Would they be safe, or even alive, when he got there? His whole
body ached, not just physically from the beating he had taken, but
it was emotionally drained from the weeks of worry. He looked at
the door knowing that all the answers lay on the other side. All he
had to do was enter.

His hands shook when he reached
for the handle.

Locked

“You dumb shit,” he berated
himself “of course it’s locked.” He took a deep breath, steeled
himself, and rammed his shoulder into the door. Pain shot through
his side and he stifled a scream. He put all his weight again and
again against the door until the pain became a dull constant.
Finally, the door flew open and he stumbled into the room.

There in front of him stood
Sarah and little Jill. Relief flooded through him at the sight and
he moved toward them.

“You’re okay,” he rejoiced and
grinned.

Both of the girls cowered,
though it was more of a flinch because the serum prevented them
from responding fully to their terror. Warkowski stopped when he
saw the fear in their eyes.

“Sarah, it’s me,” he stammered,
confused that they would be afraid of him. “Don’t you recognise
me?”

Just then he caught his
reflection in a mirror behind the two girls. His face was streaked
in blood and dirt. The cuts on his cheek still bled and his body
was covered in gore and blood.

Most of it’s not mine, thank
God, he thought. He looked hellish and couldn’t blame Sarah for not
recognising this gore-spattered figure that had violently entered
their home.

“Sarah, it’s me,” he repeated.
He raised his hands and slowly approached them.

Sarah’s face didn’t change, but
her eyes suddenly grew wider. Warkowski could see recognition
replace the fear, and then a softness that he thought he would
never see again. A single tear fell from her left eye. Warkowski
was amazed that she could portray such emotion with the serum
blocking her bodies” reactions. His own tears welled up as he
scooped both of them into his arms and hugged them tightly.

The pain was intense but he
didn’t care. He hugged them, kissing their foreheads as relief
flooded through him. He left dark stains on their skin from the mix
of dirt and blood, but they still looked beautiful. Tears flowed
freely down his face. They couldn’t hug him back. He knew that, but
that would come later when they got that damn serum out of them.
For now it was enough just to feel them in his arms. Later they
would make their way back to the meeting point, but for now this
was enough.

Chapter 17

“Drop your weapons.” The words
reverberated around the room.

John Pritchard was behind the
door when he heard the command. He quickly ducked behind a filing
cabinet and peeped out to see a rather stocky thrall issue the
command with obvious relish and his weapon was levelled evenly at
Scott Anderson. The five other thralls quickly spread out behind
him and covered the rest of the small group. The thralls” arrival
had caught them completely by surprise. He watched as Scott gave
the signal to the others to comply and dropped his own machine gun
with a sigh. Bill Anderson threw his weapon down in disgust. Jenny
White, who wasn't actually armed, laid down the bags she carried
anyway. Hackett merely placed his weapon at his feet with a
resigned shrug.

“How can you work for those
bastards?” Scott Anderson asked. Pritchard wasn’t certain, but he
thought that Scott had seen him duck behind cover. The fact that
Scott was directing attention at himself and away from Pritchard
was a good sign. He pressed himself further against the wall and
listened to the exchange.

“Oh, it’s not really so bad,”
the stocky thrall replied. “They leave us pretty much alone to do
as we like, and I do mean whatever we like.” He winked lasciviously
and the others thralls grunted agreement.

“But you’re human,” Scott
countered.

“Oh, not anymore we’re not.
We’re so much more than that now. We’re stronger and faster than
ever before, and we’re the ones in control.”

Thoughts raced through
Pritchard’s mind. He explored every avenue he could think of to
rescue something from the fiasco they found themselves in. Stupid,
he chastised himself; we should have had a guard on the door.

As silently as he could he
searched the bag he carried. He quickly disregarded the two
grenades he found. They would probably do too much damage and
injure his friends in the blast. Just then his hands found a
slightly larger, misshapen grenade and he looked up to the ceiling
and offered a prayer of thanks.

The thrall rambled on about
being more than human and Pritchard risked a quick peek. He had to
give Scott some warning if his new plan was to have any chance of
working. He looked around the edge of the cabinet and immediately
saw that all the thralls were gathered close together. Like fish in
a barrel, he thought. He brought the flash grenade out just past
the edge of the cabinet and caught the slow nod from Scott.

“Wait a minute.”

Pritchard heard the shout
interrupt the argument, but didn’t recognise the voice

“There were five of them.
Where’s the other one?”

Shit! He thought. It’s now or
never.

The grenade fell to the ground
and everyone turned automatically to the noise. Scott Anderson shut
his eyes tightly just before the flash grenade exploded and had
already hit the floor before the blinding light filled the room. He
landed on his arm and grunted with pain just as a huge explosion
seemed to shatter his eardrums. He opened his eyes a moment
later.

The intense light was gone but
his ears were still ringing painfully. The thralls were screaming
in pain and crashing about with their hands to their eyes and ears.
He could see thin trickles of blood dribble down from the ears of
the nearest thrall and then a sudden movement to his left caught
his attention. Pritchard came out from behind the cabinet with his
machinegun bucking in his hands and his mouth open in a silent
scream. Strangely, Scott couldn’t hear anything at all and he saw
two thralls shudder as bullets thumped into their flesh repeatedly.
He looked about frantically for a weapon.

There, he thought. He saw the
butt of his machine gun over to his left about five feet away and
dived towards the weapon. His shoulder hurt like hell, but he
ignored the pain and scooped up the weapon. He checked the magazine
and opened fire. He still couldn’t hear anything but the gun
shuddered in his hands and he saw the thralls begin to fall.

They never really had a chance.
The crossfire of bullets caught the thralls in a deadly hail and
they jerked violently with each impact. Bullets whined around the
room, and Scott saw Hackett clutch at his eyes and drop blindly to
the floor. His brother, over by the window, blinked furiously and
then launched himself at Jenny White, taking both of them to the
relative safety of the floor.

The bald man who had shouted
earlier wasn’t so lucky. He screamed as two bullets ripped into
him. The first impacted just below the jaw line and ricocheted off
the bone to continue on through his brain. The soft flesh didn’t
even slow the bullet down and it exited out the back of his skull.
The second round ploughed into his left shoulder and sent the man
spinning across the lab table. He was dead before his body fell to
the ground.

Pritchard stopped firing as the
last thrall finally fell.

“Let there be light,” he sang in
his best AC/DC impression but dropped his eyes sheepishly as he
realised that no-one had heard him. He had been the only one able
to cover his ears before the flash bang

“What kept you?” Scott Anderson
shouted over-loud as the hard of hearing do when they talk and
winked at him as he picked himself up to survey the damage.