After giving a half-salute half-wave, Serena jumped.
“Shield down,” Wayne shouted.
Just in time for her to land on the bow of their boat.
Wayne immediately reapplied his own shield over their boat.
“Thirty-seconds,” Serena shouted over the engine.
Sarah shouted back. “For what?”
“Until they stop thinking that every vampire in the city is charging their outpost.”
“We’ll be clear by then,” Wayne said. Probably too quiet to be heard over the engine and the gunfire, but he didn’t care.
He was too busy dragging the flamethrower’s flame across the net. It was much easier than conjuring flame from scratch, but still required concentration. Doubly so as he was both driving and maintaining a shield at the same time.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t burning fast enough.
“Hold on!”
The front of their boat hit the net, most of it catching on their shield.
Weakened from the flames, it tore.
Wayne let out a sigh of relief as their boat sped through underneath the bridge. The rope hanging off of their shield quickly burned away with a smidgen of extra effort on Wayne’s part.
He had to slow down for another turn of the river, but that turn carried them well out of sight from the sniper towers.
—
“We have with us today a very special guest.”
Wayne blinked his eyes open, yawning as the last vestiges of sleep left him.
“He wishes to remain entirely anonymous, but felt it was his duty to report what actually happened during the tragedy at Lansing.”
Wayne rolled his eyes as he glanced over at the hotel television set.
This story again.
Lansing was all anyone had talked about for a solid week. No one knew what happened. It was all baseless speculation. Everything had been blamed as the culprit. From Russian satellite weapons test to aliens of all things.
This time, however, was slightly different. Rather than talking over pictures of the crater, the journalist sat in a chair on one side of the screen. The other side had been covered with opaque glass. Only the barest hints of a shadow could be seen on the side of it.
“So,” the anchor said, “what can you tell about Lansing?”
“Thank you for having me.” His voice had been garbled to the point where it was barely intelligible. Luckily for anyone viewing, whatever news station this was had hired a quick transcriber to add subtitles to the screen. “Everywhere else turned me away as crazy.”
“Of course, Mr. Blank.” She actually said the word ‘blank.’ “We’ll let the you speak and the viewers will decide.”
“My detachment had been rounded up for emergency containment of a biological threat. Initially, that’s what it appeared to be. A strange one, to be sure, but nothing unimaginable.”
“Can you tell us the nature of the biological threat? Effects and transmission vectors?”
“Transmission, we didn’t know. None of us had been issued NBC suits–that’s nuclear, biological, chemical suits–and none of the soldiers ever came down with the ‘illness.'” The shadow moved as the man put quotes around his word. “As for the effects,” he coughed, “some seemed to turn into zombies while others turned super-human.”
“Zombies, Mr. Blank?” Despite the way she phrased her inquiry, there was no mocking in her voice.
“Sounds crazy, but when you hear what I have to say later, it’ll be the sanest thing you heard. There are certain chemical cocktails that can turn a person towards a more brain-dead state while still leaving motor functions, so it isn’t too absurd to believe that someone would have weaponized such a thing.
“For three days and three nights, we fought off the zombies and the people who took a few extra bullets to put down–”
“Did these super-humans ever attempt to communicate?”
“Never allowed them to get that close. Our orders were clear. We couldn’t allow the threat to spread.”
“I see.”
He shook his head, ignoring her slightly accusatory tone. “On the third night, things started to change. If some people who took a few extra bullets to put down counted as super-human, these things counted as absolute monsters. They would charge the fences, dodging bullets. They could take entire magazines and still run forward with speed.”
“You called them monsters, but were they human? Or actual monsters.”
“About half and half. Some had limbs like bears while others looked human. Save for a few bodies for the egg-heads, we burned all the corpses. The ones we didn’t burn still had to be restrained with steel because they didn’t always stay dead.”
“Adding to the zombie motif of this attack.”
Again, the man shook his head. “Nope. Crazier than that. That same night, a man showed up at our post. Started spouting off this nonsense about vampires.”
Rather than speak, the anchor just raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I had that expression as well. Then he started a fire in his hand. A gigantic ball of flame the size of my head. He just held it there, casually. I could feel the heat coming off of it. He extinguished the fireball and a forcefield popped up around him.”
“Experimental technology?”
“Not like anything I’ve heard of. No, he wore a sharp, well-fitting suit. The only thing he carried was a thick book. It was honest-to-God magic.”
“Magic?” Unlike her comment about zombies, the disbelief was clear in her tone now.
“Some others saw it as well, but I don’t expect them to come forward. Scary stuff. He claimed he was special forces needing to extract a VIP stuck within the city, though no one I talked to could verify his identity.”
“You don’t believe he was a special forces?”
“Could be. Could be that no one I talked to had the clearance to know. Or the clearance to tell me. Either way, his papers checked out initially. So we let him in. Our orders were to keep things from escaping, mind you, not entering.”
“Did you allow him out of the city once he secured this VIP?”
“Never saw him again. Don’t know if he made it. Though there was a disturbance the next night in which no less than fifteen trained soldiers insisted that they were under attack by about three hundred of the vampires, only for the vampires to vanish into thin air. No body parts, no blood or gore.”
“That would have been the fourth night,” the anchor said. “That just leaves the fifth night?”
“I don’t have much to say about that. It was just a blindingly white light. Flooded over the outpost to the point where no one could see anything. When it faded, the city was gone. I learned more from the recordings that have been playing on various news stations. Our own cameras were too close and only display a white screen.”
As he said that, one of the clearer clips played. It showed the smoke rising from the city from afar. Clouds overhead literally parted to allow a bright white beam of light engulf the city. The time stamp on the video then skipped to the end, roughly thirty minutes later.
The only thing left was a crater.
Wayne shuddered. Roughly twenty-four hours. That was all the spare time he had had, just missing utter annihilation.
The Elysium Order was scary. Scary enough that he was almost considering dropping his current project.
Almost.
As the television snapped back to the interview, Wayne shut it off. The anchor was just thanking Hicks–for who else could it be–for his time.
Looking around the hotel room, Wayne frowned. Zoe slept on in the adjacent bed, but there was no sign of either of the vampires. The bathroom door was open and the light was off, so they weren’t in there.
Wayne noticed the notepad propped up against the side of the room’s telephone as he got out of bed.
Went out for a bite.
Be back soon.
Took sis with me.
The three lines were punctuated with an imprint of lips. Serena had put on lipstick just to kiss the paper. She had to have. At no other point had Wayne noticed lipstick on her.