I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (27 page)

The door behind him creaked as it slowly
inched shut.

Boone returned the knife to his boot and
retrieved the Commando. He dumped the magazine and inserted a fresh
one, racking the bolt and chambering a fresh round.

The red laser beam preceded him to the lip of
the hole in the floor. Boone stood there and looked down on three
coffins. The coffins were recessed two feet lower than the rest of
the room. A few bodies lay crumpled about them.

Boone showed his teeth, lowered the barrel of
the SMG, and fired half a magazine into the coffin on the left,
leaving a ragged line of bullet holes up and down it. He shifted
the barrel and laser beam and strafed the casket on the right until
the magazine emptied. Boone dropped the magazine and slammed home a
fresh one.

“Fuck yeah.” He slung the Commando around his
back and drew a stake. Boone stepped into the depression and
approached the coffin on the left. He had never woken a sleeping
vampire. He’d heard they were easily taken in the daytime, but he
imagined they were awake and ready to spring from their sleep
chambers.

He hoped so. It wouldn’t be as much fun,
staking them without a fight.

Boone raised the stake over his head, reached
down with his free hand and flipped the lid off the first
coffin.

He’d imagined his friends were dead…the phone
calls, the message…Bowie’s words, the knowledge of what the blood
suckers were capable of and what they’d be looking to do to him and
his crew…

But facing the mutilated body of a man he’d
been joking around with two nights before, that was something else
entirely. Boone looked down into the coffin in which Madison lay.
His throat was punctured and he’d been bled out, his eyes staring
up at Boone from a pale face.

Boone stared down at him for several
moments.

He stepped around the middle coffin—afraid
because he thought he knew who was in it—to the casket on the
right. He reached down for the lid and before he pried it open he
raised the stake again, though not as high as the first time. His
arm was shaking.

Boone opened the coffin.

There was only a head in the coffin. One eye
was closed. The other was missing, the socket raw and empty. The
skin around the mouth had been cut off, revealing gum and
teeth.

He recognized Bowie from what was left of his
face and his haircut.

They’d cut his ears off too.

“Fuck…”

Boone rested his elbows on the edge of the
coffin in which his friend Bowie’s head lay, placing his own head
in his hands and breathing deeply.

He had the feeling that he was being watched
again, from somewhere further back in the dark recesses of the
room, beyond the torches. He hadn’t noticed it, but the door to the
room had closed.

“Did they tell you…” Boone called out to the
gloom. “Did they tell you what I’m going to do to you?” His voice
was subdued compared to before, but no less intent on purpose.

He stood.

“I’m going to kill you.” Boone promised the
dark. “I’m going to kill each and every one of you. I’m going to
hunt down your children…I’m going to poison your slaves…”

He stepped over to the center and final
coffin.

Gossitch
.

“I’m going to fuck your mothers and
sisters.”

He raised the stake and then lowered it,
wiping a tear from his cheek.

“You fuckers,” he called out into the dark,
reaching down to the coffin, whispering to himself again, “You
fuckers—”

Before Boone could open it, Kreshnik burst
from the casket. Its clawed hand slashed out and across Boone’s
stomach, opening him up. Boone stumbled back, clutching at his
midsection, the pain unreal.

Kreshnik rose to its full height and stepped
from the coffin. Boone tripped on the floor of the room behind him
and fell on his back, holding the stake ahead of him, attempting to
ward off the beast that stood there looming over him.

Hands clapped somewhere in the dark.

“Bravo, Boone, bravo.” A figure stepped
through the gloom.

Boone looked down at his stomach. His insides
were bulging from his midsection between his fingers and he pushed
them back in. He scrambled back on his elbows and feet, his eyes on
the Albanian and the thing in the dark.

“Well done, Boone.” The dark Lord Rainford
came into the torchlight. “But why the precipitous departure? Our
soiree is just commencing.”

The Albanian stepped forward as Boone jerked
himself back, past the crumpled bodies of the men and women and
vampires he had killed, towards the hallway and the light. Kreshnik
stepped up, out of the pit and gazed down on Boone.

“Your friend—Bowie was it?” asked Rainford.
“He died well. A dignified passage for what it’s worth. Not so
well, the other…”

Boone scowled and managed to roll onto his
side, ignoring Kreshnik as the Albanian took one step after
another, closing the space between them. He grasped his midsection
tighter and pulled himself along the floor with one arm, using his
legs to propel himself. His feet scampered and slipped on the blood
he left behind.

“I remember…” announced Rainford, his voice
closer. “I remember when I was human. I remember how hard your kind
will...fight…will struggle, to survive, even when survival is
improbable…”

Boone focused on the light framing the door
to the hall.

“…even when it is impossible.”

With a jerk, Boone was pulled back towards
the pit. Kreshnik had taken his boot in a gloved hand and dragged
him back through his own blood. Boone groaned and swiped at the
Albanian weakly with the stake, but the vampire had already let go
of his foot.

“No,” Rainford commanded the Albanian.
“Wait.”

Boone resumed his struggle, clawing his way
towards the door. The pain in his stomach was outrageous.

A gust of wind blew the door open and it
stayed that way, the light from the hall falling on Boone.

Reaching up with his arm, he planted his
elbow and pushed off with his feet, pulling himself a couple of
feet each time. He looked up through the door to the light in the
shattered window of the hallway.

“This refusal to die,” pondered Rainford,
“even when all other options have been surrendered…I suppose that
is one factor that separates your kind from mine. But you’ve little
in common with the rest of your own, isn’t that so, Boone? As I
have little with mine. Perhaps in this, we have some common
ground…”

He ignored the vampire’s words, clawing his
way into the hall, into the light. Holding his stomach tight, he
rolled on his side until he came to rest against the passage wall.
He glanced up but the window seemed so far away.

Boone was shaking. There was a blood trail on
the floor, disappearing into the room. Too much blood.

“So then…” Rainford spoke from the dark,
unseen. “You are he…the one my people whisper of with dread and
loathing. You laid low here before me…”

Boone gulped. He was sweating profusely. He
felt a cool breeze as a wind whipped up the dust and rust from the
floor. His flannel shirt jacket rolled down the hall and draped
over his inert form. And then the wind was gone.

He was vaguely aware that the thing in the
dark was speaking to him, but he was slipping into and out of
consciousness, only catching some of what it said.

“…Oh, how the mighty have fallen…”

Gossitch
. Boone shook his head.
I’m
sorry
.

“…I implore you, do not die before
sunrise…grasp you stomach and hold its contents within…a terrible
wound, indeed, but when I think of the devastation you and your
‘friends’ have inflicted on my own people…well, let us sit here and
talk and contemplate finitude together, yes?”

Boone looked from the door and the menace
that lurked there to the light above…Jennifer…Greg and Jill…

…you and I are separated by more than this
mote of daylight…

The voice from the dark and the voice in his
head…Boone could not distinguish between them. The only thing that
was real was the pain, the electric agony that exploded from his
core and coursed its way through his entirety…

…but, if what you call ‘immortality’ has
granted me one insight, it is this…

Boone heard his breathes as if they were
someone else’s…shallow and weak…He closed his eyes and opened them
and he was on a beach, mountains of bleached bone under and around
him, a crimson sun hemorrhaging in the sky…

…though the day is long, the day must pass,
as inevitably it shall, as inevitably all must do, and with its
passage comes the night…always the night…

Boone opened his eyes and looked at the stake
planted in the floor, point down. A hand was wrapped around the
stake, anchoring it to the ground. The hand was attached to an arm
and the arm was attached to his body…

…the glorious, damned night…

Boone looked down on a hallway in which a man
lay. The man was holding himself close under a blood-stained
flannel shirt jacket. The man lay in light. In the dark there were
things that meant the man harm.

…so lay there now and listen, and I will
relate to you an account of a warrior the likes you have never
known, the likes I doubt I will ever see again…in this way we shall
pass the time together, shall we not? And then will come the
night...

The sun bled onto a beach littered with the
crumpled and misshapen corpses of thousands fallen in battle. Waves
crashed on the sand and a gull screamed.

…my master was a cruel and terrible lord…

In my three hundred and twenty six years, I
have witnessed first hand the small acts of transcendence and the
bitter sting of ignominy that have come to define the human
species. I have seen the admirable, discerned the exceptionable,
and known the good. Likewise, I have beheld the vile, experienced
firsthand the deleterious, and shared, on many occasion, in the
sins of the iniquitous.

In my mind, three acts of humanity resound.
Engels was an atheist through and through, yet when his Lizzie lay
dying, he himself went to the parsonage, procuring a pastor who
came at once and joined them in matrimony. Lizzie Burns died
contented, a happy woman.

In the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, a second
Friedrich—those of us who knew him well called him Fritz—espied a
master whipping his horse. Fritz interposed himself between the
master and the subject of his flagellation, embracing the equine’s
neck. Whereupon he promptly collapsed. Nietzsche would spend the
next decade—the last of his life—in his sister Elisabeth’s attic,
gripped by lunacy. I knew him there. I have no idea what became of
the horse.

I was born in Transcarpathian Ruthenia, on
the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. There was an old
woman in my village who claimed she could divine the future. Maleva
was not of my people. She was Roma and had settled among us long
before my birth. Because she was a gypsy, she was never fully
trusted by my people. But she was respected, for she was feared.
For Maleva, it was said, consorted with the spirit world. She
herself had numerous tales of daemon and creatures fantastic, and
though there were doubters and detractors who scoffed when her name
was mentioned, my brothers and sisters and I accorded Maleva a
certain level of esteem.

Her only companion the entire time I knew her
was a small nameless mutt she kept tied up most nights outside her
cottage. My little sister, Sasha, my
dushka
, was fond of
that flea-bitten dog and would often stop to pet it when we passed
on the road. At night, when the moon was full, as we lay the five
of us together in our home, if we listened, over the sounds of my
father’s snoring, we could hear, at a distance, Maleva’s little dog
barking intermittently.

It was said of Maleva that she could foresee
events that had yet to transpire. For Maleva, as she told us
herself, the future was inchoate, indeterminate. I remember
wondering—as a boy—did this mean the future had not yet been
written? I had no answer to that query then, nor, incidentally, do
I today. Fritz tried. He tried with his notion of the eternal
recurrence, holding that since matter was finite but time infinite,
all that was had been and would be again. There were many facets of
Fritz’s philosophy that attracted me, but I must admit this was not
one.

I was too young at that time to harbor a
cynicism that would have me question Maleva’s purported ability, to
notice that her imperfect reading of events to come was a perfect
cover for what could have been fabrications meant to gull, to
entertain. Maleva’s perception of the future, as she held it, was
similar to our discernment of the past. Does anyone remember every
little detail of what went before? And do they recall it vividly? I
daresay, no. We remember specific episodes and emotions. And these
are remembered in part and not in whole, with some resonating more
so than others. Of what we educe from days past, some is
misperceived by the lens of time. Much is misapprehended through
experiences written since, experiences subtly yet irrevocably
stamped upon the past.

When one starts looking for causes, for
whys
, one finds multiple paths and threads. Each of these is
dialectically enmeshed with innumerable others, inextricably
intertwined. Engels was keen to this. No one factor, alone, seems
capable of explaining the phenomena under study, whatever the
nature of said phenomena. This, I came to realize, is how the woman
Maleva could see into the future, how she viewed that future.
If
she could actually see into that future. And though
Maleva would speak of times and events to be, I was always struck
with the futility of predicting that tomorrow. She always warned us
of the swamp.

Who then could have foreseen that third act
of humanity which impressed me so greatly, an act of which I will
speak in due time? Who then could have foreseen the convergence of
paths that led to this, our own convocation?