“Should we shoot it?” Clara whispers.
“That didn’t seem to make a difference with the security guards,” I point out.
“Then what do you suggest?”
“I’m fresh out of life-sparing ideas at the moment. You?”
The vampire is difficult to make out. Pale skin, definitely. And it looks to be female. A thick mane of hair covers most of its face and part of what seems to be a naked body. The only sounds it makes—it doesn’t breathe, obviously—is a sort of puckering, slurpy noise.
Having seen only a small portion of the compound, I wonder how many lives the vampire has claimed in the past hour. I also wonder why it’s still here. Surely it could have gotten past the fences if it wanted to. Perhaps, despite being almost entirely out of its mind, vengeance is still a primary motivational factor. Well, and feeding. There aren’t any people outside of the fence to feed upon.
All this is fairly moot speculation, as I’m surely about to have my throat ripped out by it.
“Maybe it doesn’t see us,” Clara offers.
“It sees us. I think the problem is we haven’t attacked or tried to run away. We’ve confused it.”
“Well, we’re gonna have to move soon. Those oxygen tanks’ll be exploding any minute now, and I don’t want to be too close to the building when that happens.”
“Neither do I.”
We both hear the front door to the lab slam shut. Viktor.
The vampire hears it, too.
“Viktor!” I shout. “Don’t move!”
Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t care to listen. I spot him about halfway to the administrative building running as fast as an eighty year old geneticist can run. Meaning, not so fast. And not even close to how fast the vampire can go.
I’ve never seen any creature move so quickly. The vampire catches up with Viktor in about three seconds from what has to be at least thirty yards away. For my part, I raise my gun to shoot at it, but don’t have enough time or enough of a target to make it worth the effort to try a shot. Then there’s the matter of whether or not a bullet would do any good. Vampires have thinner hides than demons, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered one this old. Seeing it move I’m wondering if it might actually be older than three centuries.
Catching him from behind, the vampire breaks Viktor’s neck with one swift jerk and buries its face into the side of his neck. It is a magnificent and terrible thing to behold. It’s also a golden opportunity to run to the nearest building and get some cover before it can come after us, but I’m so dumbfounded by the sheer violence of it all that I can’t seem to move.
Clara’s not so transfixed. “Come on!” she urges, jerking at my sleeve.
With her in the lead, we sprint to the door of the nearest building—an inner perimeter barracks house that is not, to the best of my knowledge, in use. Clara tries the door and finds it to be locked. I pull her around the side of the building and out of the light.
“We make for the admin building,” I say.
“Past the vampire?” she exclaims.
“Look at it,” I say, thumbing around the corner of the building. “The door’s unlocked.”
Thanks to the light directly over the front of the door to the administrative building, one can clearly see the door has been left slightly ajar. Clara peeks around the corner and confirms this.
“So? She’ll still catch us before we ever get there.”
A decent point. Especially since the space between us and that door is probably the best-lit area in the entire base and the vampire is right in the middle of it. The direct route would take us right past her.
“We can cut around,” I suggest. “Avoid the compound.”
“Worth a try, I guess.”
Right then, the tanks in the lab go up. The detonation is not quite tremendous enough to blow open any of the walls—it’s one of the few made of bricks, as apparently, when the army built it they took the story of the three little pigs to heart—but it does make the ground shake dramatically enough to knock both of us over.
I get back to my feet and help Clara up.
“This seems like a good time to run,” I say.
After rounding the first corner of the barracks building we take off in a dead sprint for the edge of the second barracks—the building where the scientists sleep—with me leading, but Clara in position to pass me. Impending death makes one run faster. I think that’s probably why they fire a gun before track meets.
I turn the next corner, which puts us on a beeline for the front door of the administrative building.
Or it would have, had I not tripped. I look back to see what I’d caught my leg on. Face down, in pajamas and looking extremely deceased, is one of Viktor’s teammates.
“He must have come out the window,” Clara says. Indeed, the window to the barracks has been broken out. I peer inside.
I can’t say I ever got a chance to really know all of the scientists that were a part of Viktor’s group during my stay. But they were always fairly polite and generally decent toward me, and I imagine if this were a different world and all of us ended up walking away and I ran into one of them sometime later in a bar or something, I would not have a problem sharing a drink with them. So I feel sort of sad, looking in through the shattered window and seeing the carnage inside. I don’t think any of them deserved to be murdered. Certainly most of them didn’t.
“It went in after them,” Clara whispers.
“No time to worry about that now,” I say. “We have to get out of the open.”
“Why?” she asks. “It doesn’t look like buildings pose much of a—”
She stops, staring over my shoulder. I turn around.
The vampire is between us and the open door of the admin building. I didn’t think she could suck Viktor dry that quickly.
I position myself between her and Clara, and extend my arms, a little mini-cordon that won’t stop the vampire any more than it would stop a flame thrower. But it looks gallant, and I figure I may as well go out acting gallantly. Behind me, Clara’s muttering the Lord’s Prayer.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” I say to the vampire.
She stands up from her crouch and takes two hesitant steps toward us.
“Get out of the way and I’ll shoot it,” Clara mutters.
“No,” I say. “Look.”
“Look at what?”
“She’s not attacking.”
Indeed, the vampire has stopped moving and is tilting her head and looking at us with a curiosity that seems absent any real malevolence. We’re being studied.
“Are you doing this?” Clara asks.
“I’m not doing anything. She just doesn’t want to kill us.”
“Why not?”
“Try not to sound offended.”
A noise in another part of the base somewhere, well beyond my range of hearing, but clearly not beyond the vampire’s, takes her attention away from us. Then she leaps twenty feet nearly straight up and lands on the roof of the barracks. In another second she’s out of sight.
“I think I peed my pants,” Clara says. “Why’d she do that?”
“I wish I knew,” I say. “But I’m not about to complain.”
“Let’s get one of the cars and get out of here before she changes her mind.”
“Not yet,” I say. “We still have to destroy the data on the server.”
* * *
The front door to the admin building is covered by a large wood awning with a rounded top, which distinguishes it from every other building in the place insofar as whoever designed it gave a damn about basic aesthetics. I’m guessing, based on the distribution of the windows and the apparent usage of several of the rooms, that unlike the lab, the inside was left more or less intact after it was purchased by Bob Grindel’s group. As I said, Bob tended to enjoy watching me from his picture window above that awning when I was taken to the lab in the morning. He always had this pose—feet apart, hands on hips—that gave off a certain “I am the king of all I survey” attitude that made me want to kill him. I never quite got over that.