“What are you talking about?”
Norton didn’t answer, his eyes fixated on the first of the walking dead to approach them. He shook his head. “No time, Hawk. I’m going to need a boost.”
Masters’s eyes widened when his friend drew out a wicked-looking blade from under his black coat, retrieving a crucifix with his off hand. It seemed completely out of character for Norton to even bother with such a thing.
“Boost? What kind of…” Honestly, Masters was getting really tired of asking variations of “What are you talking about?” over and over again, but he couldn’t seem to come up with anything better.
Norton pointed straight up. “Boost.”
Masters looked up and realized what Norton meant, but at the same time he figured he must have misunderstood because the top of the generator housings had to be twenty-five to thirty feet high.
“I don’t think—” he started, then checked himself.
I need to learn to stop giving Alex that kind of opening.
“Leave the thinking to me, sailor boy,” Norton grinned at him, though his smile seemed strained. “Just give me the boost.”
Masters scowled, but let his AA-12 hang on its sling, pushing it behind his back. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Norton just kept grinning as he cleared some space between them, backing up just enough before nodding to his comrade. “Ready?”
Masters scowled, cupping his hands. “I still don’t see how this is possibly going to work.”
“I already told you,” Norton said as he charged, “leave the thinking to me!”
Masters caught Norton’s foot easily, accustomed as he was to doing this very same maneuver in training and in the field. In those cases, however, he was helping a teammate clear an obstacle of maybe twelve to fifteen feet. Thirty was insane.
Insanity never stopped Alexander “The Black” Norton, however, and he leapt straight into the air with the help of Masters’s heaving boost. Rising like a rocket, Norton vanished from sight over the top of the structure even as Masters reached behind his back to grab the AA-12.
If not for the enemy figures approaching from far too close, Masters would have been cursing up a storm and yelling at his friend for breaking the laws of physics. As it was, he just wished him luck and set about the job of clearing the room.
Alexander Norton landed lightly on the top of the generator enclosure, turning automatically to scan the room from his current position. His target wasn’t bothering to hide — she was standing on the very next enclosure, glaring in his direction.
“I suppose talking this through is out of the question?” he asked casually as he examined the battlefield.
A zero-generation vampire, no cover to speak of, and lots of ways to fall thirty feet and break every bone in my body. Yeah, this is looking just peachy.
“Talk? To you?” she demanded, her accent tugging at him. He almost recognized it, but couldn’t be certain. It was European, however, which at least made sense. Her voice was raspy though, which disguised it well enough that he couldn’t pin anything down. “Why would I do that?”
He was saved from the need to respond by her suddenly charging in his direction, effortlessly clearing the twenty-foot span between enclosures as she leapt at him.
Alex twisted out of the way of her attack, slashing with the blade in his right hand as she whizzed by. Black blood welled up where the knife passed, drawing a shocked screech from her as she stumbled on her landing, rolling to a stop. He moved to take advantage, but was too slow.
She went from her back to a crouch in the blink of an eye and met his charge with one of her own. Her hands flashed out as she closed the distance, clawed fingers slashing the air as he dropped and twisted under her strike. She still hooked his leather coat, tearing a chunk out of it and drawing blood along his arm before he hit the top of the enclosure and rolled clear.
Norton came back to his feet in a single motion, blade and cross raised in front of him as she paused and turned to look back at him.
Slowly she licked his blood off her claws, her grossly misshapen features twisting into a truly disturbing smile of pleasure.
“A wielder of the Arcane. I can taste the power in you.” She sneered at him. “It will not be enough to kill me.”
“We don’t call it that anymore,” Norton said. “You’re a little behind the times.”
She moved so suddenly that she seemed to blur before his eyes, but he’d been expecting it all the same. Norton stepped into her claw strike, throwing his shoulder into her forearm to stop the blow as he pushed his left hand into her face, the cross hissing as it contacted her skin. She screamed, falling back from the smoking piece of wood, hands desperately rubbing where it had touched her.
He didn’t let up, following her retreat with an advance of his own, this time leading with a slash of his Bowie knife. The dull steel looked like something that could barely cut butter, but its edge held a telltale gleam. The vampire’s skin parted under the passing of the blade, the slice so clean that it took several seconds for the black blood to flow.
She hissed, grabbing her injured arm and jumping back.
“What manner of blade?…”
Norton smiled thinly, his eyes distinctly unamused. “Do you like it? It’s a Masterwork.”
She clearly didn’t understand what it meant, but then, he would have been surprised if she had. Masterworks weren’t common knowledge, even in the communities. Most craftsmen never created one in their lives, and almost no one managed to create two.
His Bowie had been crafted by a descendent of Jim Bowie himself, possibly the finest work she had ever made, and completely one of a kind. Almost nothing on either side of the veil was impervious to a Masterwork blade. Of the few things that were, vampires were most certainly not counted among their numbers.
The vampire snarled, shaking off the pain from her arm and face, and Norton brought both his weapons up as she began to circle him with a little more caution. He matched her, moving in the opposite direction as he tried to gauge any openings, his blade held out ahead of him as he kept the cross in his off hand, ready for a sneak attack.
Even as prepared as he was, however, he barely saw her move when she swept in the next time.
“This ain’t good, boss!” Rankin bitched as he lowered his M4 and started backing up.
Masters didn’t exactly blame him — he was moving back himself as the crowd of rotting figures stumbled in their direction. They had the same dead eyes shared by all of the vampires they’d seen this endless night, though most of them seemed to be in a marginally better state of composition.
Or is that decomposition? Masters wondered idly as he and the others slowly backed away from the leading edge of the almost literal wave of inhumanity moving toward them.
“Really?” he said aloud, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “I wonder whatever could have given you that idea?” Just because he didn’t blame Rankin for his concern didn’t mean he was going to let an opportunity to take a shot at his friend slip by.
“Hold your fire. Let them come in,” Masters ordered as he considered his options. While he had slugs loaded in his first drum, he was sure that his two Asatru allies mostly had double-aught buckshot in their weapons. While devastating at close range, buckshot was little more than an annoyance to normal humans past that, and he didn’t expect even a lucky shot to have an effect on these things.
“Eddie, you take the left side,” he said as he lifted his AA-12 to his shoulder. “I’ve got right. Canuck, GI Joe, take out any of them that get too close.”
The men nodded, arranging themselves in the corridor between the large generator enclosures as they readied themselves for battle.