He conveniently decided to ignore the fact that he wasn’t looking at anything living.
“Because I’m asking nicely,” he told it, taking another step.
“I have no use for nice.”
“Neither do I.” He shrugged, his insides going cold as he continued to move forward.
“You’re brave, human. Few would approach me so brazenly — even your friend had more respect for my power.”
Keep talking like some Bond villain, bitch.
Masters took another few steps. Fifteen feet now, and the gap was closing.
God, I wish I had some heavy munitions for this thing.
Timed grenade rounds in twelve-gauge would be a good start, but he might as well ask for a deck-mounted cannon and ship’s gunner with an itchy trigger finger. Flatten the whole damned place like the hammer of an angry god, just to be sure.
Having no genie to grant his wishes, Masters kept moving. He was a step or two away from his goal. He could probably open up now without losing much, if any, effectiveness, but this wasn’t a probably situation.
“You’re a curious one.” The thing smiled at him, her ragged lips stretched over razor-sharp-looking teeth. “Perhaps I’ll keep you around.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I have my standards.”
She laughed, reaching out for him as she took a step. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
Masters’s eyes flicked down as she closed the distance to within six feet. The chill vanished from his guts, the nervous tension gone like it had never been, and he looked up at her with a smile on his lips.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said as he squeezed the trigger on the AA-12 and held it down.
The automatic weapon was rated to fire three hundred rounds per minute; in practice that meant that it would clear the largest drum it loaded in just a hair over ten seconds. Thirty-two blasts of double-aught buckshot, fired at less than point-blank range, was enough to turn flesh into shredded meat and bone into powder.
The steel shot tore through the thing’s dried flesh, opening up internal organs to the air and spattering everything behind her with shreds of dead tissue and congealed blood. As she was driven back by the barrage of bullets, Masters kept the gap even by advancing, the AA-12 in his hands shuddering with every shot but staying on target with only a modicum of pressure from him.
Ten seconds, however, is a very short period of time. In combat, it can be an eternity, or it can pass in the blink of an eye. This time, it felt like the blink of an eye. The shotgun clacked back on an empty cylinder and Masters flipped it off the straps with a twist of his thumb, throwing the empty weapon, which was unfortunately light, at the still-standing thing in front of him.
Stunned though she might have been by the avalanche of steel, the creature had no problems batting the gun away with a swing of her arm. Masters’s hand closed on his pistol, drawing the Smith and Wesson 500 up smoothly as his thumb locked the hammer back. He pushed the big gun out straight at the target even as he stroked the trigger.
Louder than the shotgun, the Smith roared over every other sound in the immense room, startling many of the creatures into looking around for the source of the noise. The first of the heavy rounds smacked into her shoulder even as she was recovering from his assault with the twelve-gauge, the kinetic impact twisting her shoulder away from strike. Her head snapped back around, red eyes looking onto Masters with a death glare that sent a chill down his spine.
The vampire recovered, springing up and taking a step in his direction, forcing him to backpedal desperately as he was now eager to keep some distance between them. The Smith roared again, the round splitting her skull like a ripe fruit and dropping her in her tracks like a wet bag of sand.
Masters swallowed, cocking the trigger back and re-aiming the weapon. He wasn’t about to do anything stupid like relax.
In fact…
The Smith roared three more times, emptying its remaining cylinders into the immobile form. The thing’s skull was a fragmented mush, and its chest was completely caved in right where the heart was located.
Masters resisted the temptation of getting closer and nudging the body with his toe. He’d seen too many horror movies for that to seem like a good idea, so he took another step back and opened the cylinder breach of his Smith, letting the empty cartridges fall to the cement as he reached for more of the big half-inch-diameter rounds to refill the weapon.
“Yo, Alex!” he called over his shoulder. “I think it’s dead, man!”
There was no answer as he dropped the first cartridge into the revolver’s cylinder, thumbing the big chunk of metal over a bit so that it would accept the next.
“Alex!” Masters started to worry. His friend hadn’t been in the best of shape, but the section of the catwalk where he’d left him had been pretty clear. The horde seemed to be more interested in the rest of the team down below. He dropped another round into the cylinder, moving it ahead automatically, and risked a glance over his shoulder.
Masters let out a breath of relief, though it was mixed with more than its fair share of anxiety — Alex was slumped over the railing. He looked like he was in poor shape, but he was still alive, in one piece, and alone. Masters grabbed his fourth half-inch cartridge and slipped it into the chamber of the big pistol as he turned back and froze.
The body wasn’t there anymore.
Damn it! Masters spun around as he flipped the big gun closed, one round from a full load. How the hell did that thing move with its skull split open like a ripe watermelon?!
It would be one thing if he’d put a bunch of low-caliber rounds in center mass, but Masters had seen its skull. Hell, he’d seen its frigging brains. He turned, sweeping the whole area as quickly as he could, but there was no sign of the damned thing anywhere.
Take out its neural system, right, he thought, disgustedly. Alex wasn’t kidding when he said this one was a different class.
Below and around him, Masters could hear gunfire and the sounds of fighting. He knew that his people were still fighting, but standing there on the generator enclosure, he suddenly felt rather like the bimbo cheerleader who had wandered off on her own in a bad horror movie. It was a sensation he really could have done without.
After covering the full three hundred and sixty degrees of the room with several turns, Masters slowly made his way back to where Alex was slumped.
“Alex! Alex!” he hissed. “Wake the fuck up! I can’t find that freak!”
“So I’m a freak, am I?”
Masters froze, the voice whispering in his ear damned near taking his breath away. He knew he didn’t stand a chance, but he spun around anyway and brought his Smith up to take a shot. A hand blocked him as easily as he might stop a child from taking a swing on him, viciously shaking the pistol out of his hand.
It clattered to the cement, then spilled over the edge, falling thirty feet to the floor. Meanwhile, Masters found himself face to face with something from his worst nightmares.
“Do you have any idea how long it will take to fix what you’ve done?” she hissed in his face, black fluid leaking from the gaping split in her skull. “Dead flesh does not heal.”
Masters swung at her, only to be blocked by her other arm, which effortlessly held him in place. He grimaced at the thing’s sheer strength, unable to budge even an inch. He settled instead for spitting in its face.
“I hope you rot, walking around or not.”