The Regulators - 02 (28 page)

“
So basically, they
are good for real life threats, but the Regulators are good for supernatural
threats that don’t follow the normal routines of man
?”

There ya go.

“
Okay, I’m very
anxious to find out what happened after Scalp Hunter and Snake Charmer were
extracted from the rooftop
.”

Immediately after the helicopter took off, I radioed to
Dudley. I wanted to see how things were going for him.

“
And how were things
going
?”

Excellent, those guys had managed to pull off one extraction
after another. Plus, they had collected their own supply of wooden bullets
courtesy a helicopter drop off arranged by Hardin. It was also a relief to hear
that they hadn’t run into any more booby traps, but I was pretty sure that
there were still plenty of traps out there just waiting to be sprung. I told
him to be careful and to be ready to back me up if I called him.

“
To back you up
?”

Yes, I had a feeling things were coming to a close with my
vampire stalker. The reason I felt that way was due to the nature of the trap.
All the other traps were zombie traps. We touched a doorknob, and zombies came
after us. This trap, however, was a vampire trap. The hotel was a nest.

I figured that this trap was more important to her than the
others due to the vampire children. Also, I put myself in the mind of a hunter
and realized that if I set a trap, I would want to see the results when it was
sprung. For all I knew, she may also want to check on the vampires in the nest.
They didn’t seem keen on leaving the hotel so somebody must have been bringing
them victims.

I was guessing, or maybe I was hoping, I don’t know, but I
was guessing or hoping that she would turn up before dawn to see how things had
gone down and dawn was only a couple of hours away.

“So what’s next on the agenda?” Nick asked.

“We prepare a little welcome home surprise,” I answered.

Nick followed me back into the hotel and into one of the
rooms. I had left a couple of the vampires alive.

“What are you planning?” Nick asked.

“I’m planning on setting my own trap,” I answered.

“They’re just kids. We should put them out of their misery,”
Nick said.

“They stopped being kids when my stalker turned them into
monsters,” I answered. “My goal is to stop her from doing this to anyone else,
but in order to do that I need to get my freaking hands on her.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” I answered. “But I’m out of options, and she
has a friend of mine captive. So unless you have a better way of bringing her
in, hush up and grab a hold of its legs.”

To give Nick some credit, he actually stopped grumbling and
picked up the vampire’s legs. We carried the paralyzed vampire to the roof and
went back to get the next one. Once we had both vampires on the roof, I wrapped
their feet up with some rope out of my backpack and tossed them off the edge.

They fell about ten feet on each side of the building; the
trap was set.

“
Can you explain the
details of the trap for me
?”

Sure, I took the two remaining paralyzed vampires and hung
them off two different sides of the roof. Across the streets of each side of a
hanging vampire were tall buildings of the type my stalker seems to prefer
since she travels by rooftop.

My hope was that she’d swing by before dawn in order to see
what had happened with her booby-trap. When she approached the building, she
would see one of the paralyzed vampires. If she circled the building, she’d see
both of them.

After that, she’d have to make a choice. She could rescue
the vampires or she could let them burn in the sun.

“
Wouldn’t she know it
was a trap
?”

Yeah, it was a pretty obvious trap, but if she wanted to
save those vampires from burning in the sun, she’d need to do something anyway.

All Nick and I had to do was wait.

“
Were you certain that
sunlight would kill them
?”

Yeah, my stalker never bothered me during the daytime. Also,
Hardin said earlier that sunlight would take them out.

So that was that. We just hunkered down beneath the lip of
the roof and waited to see if she’d show. It was shortly before dawn when she
finally made her appearance. Nick noticed some movement on the side he was
watching.

“Jax,” he said. “I think I saw something.”

“What do you think you saw?” I asked.

“I saw movement on the building across the street,” he
answered.

I rapidly crawled over to him and looked over the lip of the
roof.

“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Just keep watching,” he answered.

After what felt like a long time later, I finally saw her.
She was in between what looked like brick support columns about midway up the
building across the street. She had also changed her clothes. For some reason,
she was wearing a white tutu and unitard. It was an odd choice of clothes to be
sure, but I doubt vampires are very much in touch with fashion.

She was pretty much level with the vampire we had dangling
off of our roof, and she was making a bunch of odd clicking sounds in its
direction. I could see the black drool dripping off of her chin.

I removed my tomahawk from my belt.

Nick readied his mp7.

All she had to do was get close enough for me to pounce on
her.

I expected her to jump to our roof, but instead she crawled
up to the top of her own building and crouched on the edge. We watched as she
paced back and forth. Suddenly, she jumped to a neighboring building and then
proceeded to hop from building to building until she had made a complete circle
around the hotel.

We waited patiently and merely watched.

She knew it was a trap. That much was obvious when she
slammed her fist down on the edge of the roof and sent pieces of brick down
onto the street below. She was frustrated, but she wasn’t taking the bait. She
didn’t want to walk into danger.

We waited silently.

She began to pace back and forth once again. She examined
our rooftop from every conceivable angle, but she never once saw us because we
had moved away from the lip and ducked low under a billboard sign.

Dawn was less than an hour away.

She finally made her move.

The leap carried her from her building across the street all
the way to the top of our building. If she would have stopped to sniff for us,
she would have found us easily. However, she seemed to be extremely nervous and
instead of checking her surroundings she immediately went to the rope and began
to pull the helpless vampire back onto the rooftop.

We made our move.

Nick unloaded on her, and just as she turned to face her
attacker, I buried my tomahawk deep into her chest. She reacted violently,
grabbed the collar of my vest and slammed my head onto the edge of the rooftop
before dropping the rope holding the immobilized vampire and rushing towards
Nick.

It took me just a moment to clear the cobwebs from my head
and shake the stars out of my vision. I unloaded a blast from my mp7 right
before she could get her hands on him. She arched her back in pain and spun
once again in my direction.

My tomahawk was still embedded in her chest. She grabbed the
handle, wrenched it free, and threw it back at me. Much to her surprise, I
caught the weapon by the wooden handle and threw it right back at her.

The blade of the tomahawk embedded itself into the side of
her collarbone and slashed open her carotid artery. The black blood began to
gush forth, and she screamed so loud I had to cover my ears.

When she finally stopped, I noticed to my dismay that her
jaw had elongated and filled with fangs. She was laughing at me as she pulled
the weapon out of her collarbone and held it in her hand. I drilled her with
another fully auto blast from my machine gun. The impact spun her in circles,
and Nick connected a solid crunching blow to her spine with his fireman’s axe.

I had no doubt that we owed our success to the wooden
bullets. They weren’t bringing her down, but she was definitely getting weaker.

The bullet holes were not healing and black blood was
leaking freely from the wounds. Her neck was still gushing, and she was trying
to staunch the flow of blood with her hand as she ran away from us to the edge
of the roof and hesitated.

She looked as if she was worried about making the jump in
her injured state.

“Bastard,” she said in a low voice as she turned to face me.

I shot her again.

She ran towards me, and Nick immediately started shooting
her in the back, but she wasn’t stopping. When she was close enough, she swung
my own weapon at me, but I managed to duck under the blade and slash out with
my folding knife. She was getting slower; my blade was able to sever the
connective tissue of her left arm and she dropped my weapon as she ran past me
towards the metal door of the building.

She was still scary fast.

The metal door slammed shut behind her with an extremely low
bang.

“Are you hurt?” I asked Nick.

“She never touched me,” he answered. “How’s your head?”

“Hurts like a bitch,” I answered.

“It’s no wonder,” Nick said. “You’re bleeding pretty badly,
probably ruined your cap.”

“I’ll worry about it later,” I said as I rushed towards the
metal door.

She had jammed it into the frame, and we wasted precious
moments figuring out how to get through. In the end, Nick’s fireman’s axe was
able to get in between the door and the frame and pry it open. I made a mental
note to stop picking on his lame weapon.

The bodies in the hallway had been disturbed.

“I think we’re in trouble,” I whispered to Nick.

“Fuck that,” he answered. “We’ve got this bitch on the run.
Let’s go finish this shit.”

“Get behind me,” I ordered.

Fortunately, Nick actually listened. It was then that I
heard the laughter. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It seemed to be
echoing around the entire floor.

Nick and I both froze in the hallway.

The situation was bad. I didn’t want to get stuck in an
empty hotel with a bloodthirsty vampire without an avenue of escape. The
situation would have been so much better out on the street where we could get
away from her if things went bad. I had the distinct feeling that I was a fly
walking right into a spider’s web.

“I don’t get it,” Nick said. “Despite her wounds, she was
still a bad ass. Why’s she hiding?”

I didn’t answer. Nick talks a lot when he’s nervous. It’s
best to just ignore him, because nothing else really makes him shut up.

I heard a noise coming from one of the rooms, and I rushed
forward with my mp7 in a ready position. I kicked open the door to find my
suspicions confirmed. The vampire was feeding off of the corpses of all the
vampire children we had killed.

She had used their blood to jumpstart her healing.

As soon as I broke down the door, she stopped her feeding
and hurled the corpse at me. I ducked out of the way, but Nick wasn’t so lucky.
The impact took him off his feet. I unloaded an entire magazine on the vampire
as she streaked around the room in an attempt to avoid taking too much damage.

She was screaming so loud that I wanted to cover my ears,
but I couldn’t ease up for even a moment, or I ran the risk of her healing up
completely. The cut to her carotid artery had already closed over, but her skin
was a sickly pale color, and that’s saying a lot because she was already
grayish to begin with. There were even dark circles under her eyes causing her
face to have an almost hollow appearance. She definitely wasn’t in top shape,
but she was still very dangerous.

In less than a second she had grabbed a hold of me once
again. This time I was ready for her and as soon as she was close enough, I
flashed out my folding knife and once again opened up her neck. She reacted
violently and threw me across the room into Nick who was just getting to his
feet.

The black blood was spraying everywhere as she raced past us
towards the stairs.

We collected ourselves as quickly as we could and followed
after her. The only problem was that in addition to my head wound, I now had a
pronounced limp that was slowing me down considerably. I tore something in my
knee when I was slammed into Nick, and the stabbing pain traveling up my thigh
told me it was probably serious.

I just didn’t have time to heal myself. If I took the time,
we’d lose her. If we lost her, she would heal herself completely and come back
for us at a different time. It was now or never. I took the stairs two at a
time, just trying to close the distance.

It wasn’t until the final flight of stairs that my knee gave
out entirely and I tumbled the rest of the way to the landing. I came up on my
good leg immediately and wiped the blood away from my eyes with my free hand.

Nick was staring at me in amazement.

I tried to take another step, but I only fell down again.

Things were looking bleak. I had lost the vampire. I had no
idea where to look for her outside of the building.

Nick was trying to help me back up and restrain me at the
same time when Dudley radioed in.

“Jaxon, you there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I’m here.”

“Are you still hunting after that vampire chick?”

“No,” I answered. “I blew it. We had her wounded, and I screwed
up and lost her.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Dudley. “I think I
just found her lair.”

“It’s her nest, asshole,” Nick said after clicking his
earpiece.

“What?” Dudley asked.

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “Give me directions.”

Dudley was on a street called Baltimore. It was pretty close
to UTEP: that’s University of Texas at El Paso. I’m sure I mentioned it before,
but it’s the local college. I actually graduated from there.