The Regulators - 02 (30 page)

“Maybe you should sit this one out. I can take up your
slack.”

“You think so?” I asked. “You think you can do some of the
things I did in that hotel? They ought to write songs about my awesomeness. I
doubt they would do the same for you though. Nothing really song worthy about
hiding out in the Camino Real.”

“I wasn’t hiding. I was plotting. I was devising a plan that
would allow me to destroy all my enemies, and for fuck’s sake, how the hell do
you close the top on this thing? I’m freezing my ass off.”

I fortunately hadn’t even noticed how cold it was until he
started complaining. Cold weather just didn’t seem to bother me much anymore.
Once he pointed it out, I realized that it was cold, but it still didn’t bother
me much.

Fortunately, the cold air wasn’t slowing him down any. The
man was hauling ass. It’s a really nerve-racking experience being in a vehicle
with that guy when he’s in a hurry, but I wasn’t about to complain. He was
making excellent time. The sky was just starting to brighten up when we finally
made a wild left turn on Mesa. You would have thought that Nick would need to
slow down somewhat and pick a course through all the abandoned cars on the
street, but he didn’t.

Instead, he floored it. He slammed the brakes. He shoved
cars out of his way and he even jumped the curb and tore off on some sidewalk
when he got frustrated.

“I’ve always wanted to do this shit,” was all he said when
he caught me staring at him.

On the plus side, he had at least begun to lighten up and
relax a bit. He seemed just a little too tense when we were back at the hotel
fighting the vampires. I was beginning to get a little worried that he wouldn’t
be able to handle the stress.

It seemed as if he’d somehow found a way to adjust.

“Are you gonna kill this bitch, or are you going to try and
capture her?”

“I’m going to kill her,” I answered sharply.

“If you kill her, how are you going to find out anything
about Kingsley?” Nick asked.

I didn’t have an answer for that. I hadn’t even thought
about it, and now that I was, I still didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t too sure
that we would be able to capture her. She was scary tough. If we went in with
anything less than lethal intent, she’d probably tear us apart.

In the end, I had to go with extreme violence. If the
opportunity to ask questions arose, I’d take advantage of it, but I was by no
means expecting that opportunity to arise. It wasn’t like she was exactly
talkative whenever we got up close and personal.

“
If you weren’t going
to get any information out of her about Kingsley, what were you going to do to
find him
?”

Tear the damn city apart.

I don’t doubt him for
an instant. There’s nothing about the man that would even lead me to believe
that he was being anything less than brutally honest. His dedication to his
friends has no bounds. There simply wasn’t enough danger in the entire world
that would make him give up until his friend was safe and sound.

It’s hard not to
respect him even more
.

“
What happened when
you got to the house on Baltimore
?”

We drove through a nice park and parked right next to where
Dudley had parked his Jeep. The idea was to not let the vampire know that we
were waiting for her to show so neither of the Jeeps were directly in front of
the house. It wasn’t like we had hidden them extremely well, but dawn had
arrived. The first rays of sunlight were peaking over the mountain and
repelling the darkness away for yet another day.

I was betting that she’d be in such a hurry to find a quiet
and dark hiding place that she wouldn’t even notice the two Jeeps.

I used Nick for support as we moved hurriedly through the
park, across the street, and to the front yard of the house in which we were
setting our trap.

Maybe I was just imagining things, but the house felt
sinister. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. There was something evil in that
house, something that shouldn’t be there. I don’t know how else to describe it.
The house didn’t want us to enter.

I think Nick felt it too. He came to an abrupt halt the
second he stepped foot into the yard. Yeah, I’m positive he felt it. The house
was a place of pain and death.

Then, we heard the muffled thumps of silenced automatic fire
coming from inside.

I was the first one in despite my wounded leg. At first, I
saw almost nothing. All the windows had been blackened out with a dark paint.

Then, I heard a vampire screaming.

I also heard Georgie screaming.

I was too late. Somehow, despite her injuries, the vampire
had beaten me to the house. I hobbled in the direction of the scream and saw
the shoved aside rug. I heard more silenced gunfire.

As soon as I approached the pit, the vampire leaped out. She
was covered in bullet holes but her throat had closed once again. I watched as
her face registered first shock at my being in her lair and then anger that I
had discovered her hiding place.

I slammed my tomahawk straight down on the top of her head.

In response, she gave me an open handed slap that even
though I managed to somewhat deflect with my arm, it still sent me sailing
across the room. My arm was sprained from the blow, but fortunately I managed
to not land on my bad leg.

“I’ll kill you,” she growled as she followed me across the
room with my tomahawk jutting from her skull.

I responded by drilling her in the chest with my mp7. Then
Nick appeared and opened fire as well. Dudley was slowly climbing out of the
pit. He looked injured, but he also began to fire upon the vampire.

She twisted and turned under the storm of wooden bullets,
but she still wouldn’t go down. Instead, she leapt to the ceiling and began to
roll around on it as we pelted and pelted her. I’m not sure when Javie and
Merrick arrived on the scene, but Javie began to shoot at the windows.

It took but a second to realize just how great of an idea he
had, and I ordered Nick to join him.

“Which windows?” Nick asked as he avoided a clawed hand.

“All of them,” I answered.

The room was filled with smoke and dust from the bullets
tearing up the walls and ceiling when a beam of sunlight finally entered the
room and the screams of the vampire came to an abrupt stop. Then we heard the
loud whack of a body hitting the tiled floor. It was hard to see through all
the dust, and my eyes were beginning to water so I couldn’t make out where the
vampire had fallen.

“Did we get her?” Dudley asked.

“I’m not sure; I can’t find her.”

The soft tapping on the back of my shoulder should have
alarmed me, but for some reason I thought it was one of my teammates.

It was the vampire. She was smiling at me and dangling my
tomahawk by the blade between two of her fingers. Somehow, she had managed to
find the one patch of shadow in the entire room and was safe and sound.

For the moment.

I reached out with all my might and grabbed her by the
throat while at the same time shoving her against the wall. My actions had the
desired effect, and she never noticed that I had dropped my mp7 and flicked out
my folding knife.

She easily removed my hand from around her neck, but the
look on her face as my knife yet again opened her throat was priceless.

The blood began to gush, and I was able to slash her neck a
few more times before she was finally able to overcome the shock of my attack
and kicked me across the room.

She didn’t even try to advance on me. She didn’t get a chance.
Dudley had begun shooting out the windows behind her and for the first time she
kissed the sunlight.

The effects were less than impressive.

She didn’t burst into flames. She didn’t roll up into a ball
of agony and simply burn away. She just sort of melted. Nothing incapacitating,
nothing like that at all, just think of nasty sunburn and multiply it by about
a thousand.

Her flesh did bubble and crisp, and smoke did rise from the
exposed flesh, but I was pretty disappointed that she didn’t explode.

Well, on second thought, she did sort of explode. She
exploded right out of the room and down the hallway to what seemed to be the
bedrooms.

“Did you see that shit?” Dudley asked.

“Yeah, I saw it. Where does that hallway lead?”

“It leads to the bedrooms, but which one did she enter?”

Even through the dust I saw what he was talking about. There
were at least five rooms at the end of the hallway, but only one of them had a
shattered door.

“Let’s finish this,” I said to no one in particular.

I began to slowly walk towards the hallway when Nick started
shouting.

“We got company,” Nick said. “Lots and lots of company.”

Right after he said that, I heard the moans. Fortunately
none of them were screaming yet, but that was only a matter of time. They
tended to be a bunch of noisy bastards whenever something aroused their
curiosity.

“Hold them off,” I shouted back. “Don’t let them get into
the house.”

“I’m on it,” Nick said, and he and Javie began firing out
the windows at the zombies flocking towards us.

“Dudley,” I said. “You’re with me and…and…where the hell is
Georgie?”

I was beginning to panic. Both Dudley and Georgie were in
that pit and only Dudley had emerged. I didn’t waste a moment limping to the
edge of the hole. When I got there, he almost shot me in the face.

Georgie was just fine. In fact, he didn’t seem to have a
mark on him. I would have laughed, but the moment really wasn’t there.

“Georgie,” I said. “Stop being a pussy and do something
useful. Get those survivors out of those chains and do it now.”

I’m pretty sure that he nodded, but I didn’t wait around. I
immediately set off towards the room with the broken down door. Dudley was
right behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin when he started tapping me
on the shoulder.

When I turned around I saw that he was handing me my
tomahawk, I breathed a sigh of relief and muttered my thanks. I was going to be
needing that particular weapon.

When we entered the room with Merrick, the stink of vampire
hit us like a slap. It’s a nasty smell that I couldn’t even begin to describe.
It’s not as bad as the smell of zombies, but it’s close.

The dark room seemed to be deserted, but the smears of blood
along the walls gave it a sort of lived in appearance. Merrick began to sniff
around the floor, and I walked over for a closer inspection of what she had
found.

She was sniffing at some drops of some type of liquid, but
in the darkness I couldn’t tell if the liquid was vampire blood or human blood.
Dudley had walked past us towards the bathroom as I studied the drops, and he
returned from the empty room with a confused look on his face.

I pulled out my flashlight and shined the beam on the drops.
The bright light lit the floor up in a wide circle, and I was able to see the
black drops of vampire blood that Merrick had been sniffing at.

I got down on all fours and searched for more of the
vampire’s blood. I found what I was looking for on the side of the bed.

“Is she under the fucking bed?” Dudley asked as he backed
away.

In order to answer his question, I grabbed a corner of the
bed and flipped the entire thing out of the way. There was another hole beneath
it. It was barely wide enough for me to fit through.

“Are we going down there after her?” Dudley asked.

“I guess so,” I answered.

“I need to find another line of work,” Dudley mumbled.

I didn’t respond. In fact, I agreed with him.

I jumped down the hole and made sure to land on my good leg.
All in all, I’d say it was about eight feet deep and it opened up into an 8’x8’
room with a ceiling made up of many different sizes of wooden boards so low
that I had to duck my head. Dudley almost landed on top of me when he jumped
down. As I looked around the room, I noticed that the dirty plywood walls had
blood smears.

Merrick began to bark from the top of the hole.

“Maybe we should take her with us,” Dudley said. “She can
track the vampire.”

“No,” I answered. “I don’t want Merrick getting too close;
she might get hurt. Besides, I can follow the vampire’s trail.”

“Well, where are you going to start? This room has no
exits.”

He was right about that. There were no clear passages
leading out of the room. I was thinking that there had to be a hidden door
somewhere so I aimed the beam of my flashlight downwards and started searching
the dirt floor.

It took awhile, but I finally found a drop of black blood
and two feet away from that one, I found another one. The blood drops led me
across the room to a corner with a hairline crack in the wood. I tapped on the
area near the crack and was rewarded with a hollow echo.

I then punched the area and the piece broke free revealing a
tight hidden passage in the corner of the wall. Dudley and I were going to have
to crawl through it. It wasn’t a very pleasant notion.

The little tunnel led another eight feet under the house and
we emerged into a room very similar to the one we had just left, complete with
a wooden ceiling consisting of different sized boards and plywood walls. The
only exception was that this room held a coffin.

Dudley let out a deep breath when he emerged from the tunnel
and saw the wooden coffin. We had come to the end of the line. The tension in
the air was thick enough to cut with a knife. Also, there was a presence of
evil. It just felt wrong to be in that room, but I couldn’t leave. I had a job
to do. I had a duty to perform, and I wasn’t leaving until accounts were
settled.

I quietly approached the coffin. I could no longer hear
Merrick barking from the bedroom. I could no longer hear the muffled sound of
gunshots as Nick and Javie kept the approaching zombies from entering the
house.