There was something chillingly wrong about walking through a town and seeing no one. It was a feeling that couldn’t be explained, and it was only made worse by the cheerful lights that still blazed through the night. There were cars parked just about everywhere one would expect to see them, but then there were also some sitting abandoned in the street, the doors still open and, in one case, the radio blaring.
“Jeez. I don’t get it, where is everyone?” Judith asked softly as they crouched in the cover of a building with a sign announcing it as “Arctic Pizza.”
Masters didn’t say anything, but that was the question of the hour in his opinion.
There should be someone out here, even if it’s just the bad guys. He didn’t know what to think — nothing was adding up. All he had to go on was what Alex had said about vampires, but if there was some gang of blood drinkers walking around town, where were they?
A hundred and fifty feet deeper into town they found the first body.
Unfortunately it wasn’t the last.
A dozen corpses littered the street, rust-red halos circling them in the slush and snow. The team was silent as they walked through the grisly scene, their eyes not quite able to avoid the magnetic pull of the hideous injuries of the dead. All of the bodies had their throats torn out, and mangled and ragged strips of flesh were sometimes still connected to the chunks that someone, or something, had spit back out.
Most of the victims had other visible injuries as well, particularly on their right hands and arms, most of which had been bitten and torn all the way to the bone. They were all in uniform, guardsmen and state troopers, and there were drawn weapons lying next to each of the bodies.
“Goddamn,” Rankin hissed as he picked up an M4 and checked the action. “Fired. They went down hard, boss.”
Hawk just grunted, unsurprised.
“This one was fired too,” Derek said, tossing a pistol back to the body he’d taken it from.
“Same here.”
“Here too.”
“Christ,” Judith uttered, pale and shaken, as she forcibly restrained the urge to vomit. “If they all fired their weapons, where are the downed enemies? Hell, where’s the blood?!”
While not pure as the driven snow, so to speak, the ice and snow was conspicuously clear of blood. Only the troopers and guardsmen had bled on this ground. Hawk didn’t say anything, however. He just tapped Alex on the shoulder and nodded at a body that was slumped against a wall.
While the others stood guard, Alex knelt by the body. It was a man whose throat had been torn out, and he was still holding an empty forty-five in his hand.
“I don’t know how it’s possible,” he said as Masters stepped over and crouched down beside him, “but we are dealing with vampires.”
“So where are they?” Masters asked, glancing at the body, which belonged to one of the state troopers. He patted it down and pulled out a flip folder. “Well, Captain Jones, you had a lousy night.”
“His lousy night isn’t over,” Alex said, shaking his head. “We’ve got another…four, maybe six hours.”
“Before what?”
They both glanced up to see Captain Andrews staring down at them, hands on her hips as her weapon hung from its straps.
Alex glanced over at Masters, who just shook his head.
“Right,” Alex said. “Whatever. I have to take care of this — you know that, right?”
“Do it.” Masters stood up, brushing past Captain Andrews as he rejoined the team.
Alex nodded, pulling a dagger from his boot. He patted the body on the head before grabbing it by the hair and pulling it forward to expose the back of the neck.
“Go in peace, my friend,” he whispered as he lifted the blade up.
“Hey, what are you—” Andrews started before jumping in shock when he drove the blade of his dagger into the neck of the cadaver, twisting it violently. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Shut up, Captain,” Masters said, pulling her back. “Something might hear you.”
“Something?” she hissed. “Why the hell is he doing that?”
“Don’t ask,” Masters told her. “You don’t want to know.”
“Like hell I don’t want to know,” she hissed as Alex moved on to another corpse to repeat the grisly task. “You can’t have men running around desecrating the bodies of state troopers!”
“Better than having men running around being eviscerated by the bodies of state troopers,” he replied, shouldering away from her and turning to look at the rest of his team. “We’ve got an ID on our perps, and it’s not good.”
“I think we all worked that out by now,” Rankin said, nodding at Alex, who was continuing his dark work. “The question we’re asking is, do we walk out of here? Or do we run?”
“Job’s not done,” Masters said. “I’ll let you know when I figure out the exit strategy.”
There was no forthcoming reaction from them, but then again, he wasn’t waiting for one either.
“Djinn,” he said into his mic.
“Go for Djinn.”
The sniper’s voice was low but clear, and Masters glanced involuntarily in the direction where he knew the man was camped out before continuing.
“Be advised, this op is definitely one of ours. Expert says the town crawls.”
“Roger.”
“You see anything?”
“Negative. It’s too quiet.”
“Yeah, you got that right. Stay frosty, Djinn.”
“Like I have a choice.”
Masters chuckled as he closed the link and turned around. “You done, Alex?”
“Yeah,” Norton replied, cleaning the blade of his knife on the unfortunate trooper’s pants before getting up. “But if they’re this sloppy, we’ve got a problem.”
“You didn’t think we had one before?” Derek Hayes snorted, shaking his head.
“We had a mystery before. Now we’ve got an infestation.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Andrews asked again.
Masters just rubbed his forehead, ignoring the question that he didn’t have time for. “How bad?”
Alex shrugged. “Dunno. I do know that it’s about to get a lot worse.”
“How much worse?”
“How many state troopers and guardsmen did you say came up here? These aren’t the only ones.…”
“Oh shit.”
Judith Andrews’s first time in the field was turning into an insane roller coaster that was rapidly dropping into a level of nightmare she’d only reserved for psycho-thriller movies. Sure the admiral had handed her walking orders, and she knew that Masters was in charge, but cutting up the body of a state trooper went beyond the pale.
For that matter, ignoring her every time she asked what the fuck was going on wasn’t too nice either.
She could hear them whispering when they thought she was out of earshot, and the word “vampire” was pretty hard to miss. She didn’t know if it was code, or if they were just superstitious and even more spooked by the situation than she was, but in either case she was beginning to regret volunteering to join them on this lunatic’s run.
Reflexively she tightened her grip on the HK417 she was carrying, wondering if the admiral had any idea just how crazy Harold Masters really was. His Teams file didn’t indicate anything like what she was seeing, so he must have truly lost it on that last mission.
At least that explains why he was burned from the navy in the first place. God, why did Admiral Karson ever think to pull him back? What the hell kind of hold does he have over the admiral?
Whatever it was, Karson had to be in a spot to entrust a team to a lunatic like Masters.
She knew that she was in a bad spot. The men she was depending on for her life were navy rejects, who probably should never have passed the Teams’ psych evals, and for all the danger they obviously presented, it was pretty damned clear that the situation they were all in wasn’t too damned rosy either.