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“Why not?”
“Why not?” The lights flickered, and he waved his arms. “That’s why not! What if you get stuck between levels? What if they hear you coming? What if—”
“They’re supposed to hear me coming.”
“What?”
“This is just a diversion,” I told him, looking at the main lobby. And at the gory creature that was still stuck to the wall. “To draw some of the vamps away from the stairs.”
“And how does that help? You’ll still have—”
“And to blow a bunch of them up. I’ve rigged a trip wire across the door. They fight their way into the elevator, and our odds will get a whole lot better.”
Ray’s forehead wrinkled as he stared down at the complete absence of any such wire. “But I don’t see—”
I clapped a hand over his mouth, turned him around and pointed him at the damned vamp. Who was now blind, and missing a hand, but not deaf. “They’ll hear the elevator, assume I’m crazy enough to come down that way, and get themselves blown up.”
Ray wrenched out of my grip and turned around to stare at me. And then at the elevator. And then at me again. And then he started shaking his head and gesturing and mouthing something I didn’t even try to interpret because I could guess pretty well.
“Meanwhile, I’ll run down the stairs on the other side of the building and get ’Du,” I told him. “Do you get it now?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I get it,” he said savagely, as the elevator doors started to close. With me inside, because regardless of what I’d just told Ray, I didn’t have the ammo or the firepower to fight my way down twelve floors of vamps. The idea was just to make them think I did, and buy me some time for what I really hoped would be a quick trip.
And yes, Ray had a point. This was insane and stupid and a whole list of other things, but it was also the only plan that might work. Only it didn’t look like he thought so.
He stared at me for half a second, looking mad as hell for some reason I didn’t particularly get. And then he apparently went crazy, too. Because he turned sideways and slipped through the narrow crack, right before the doors shut. Leaving me with nothing to do but glare, because I was holding down the twelfth-floor button and the close-door button at the same time and didn’t have a hand free to slap him.
It was an old trick that worked for a lot of elevators to take you straight to your floor regardless of who else might have mashed a button. In other words, it was the express route down. Not that I expected to make it the whole way, but even half would improve our odds a lot.
At least, it would if there hadn’t been any senior masters on duty tonight. I was assuming that was the case because of the speed of the takeover. It looked like the necromancer had used Slava’s boys as a kind of Trojan horse, and they couldn’t have gotten here more than half an hour before I did. And Radu had been in distress ten minutes after that.
That didn’t say senior master to me.
At least, I really hoped not, or this was going to be a very short trip.
Of course, it might be anyway.
An arm suddenly punched through the door panel when we were on level six, only to get withdrawn, missing a good deal of flesh, when we hit seven. Where several more tried to widen the gap, but I kept my finger on the button and Ray grabbed my .45 and shoved it through the hole and just kept on firing. I don’t think he could see what he was aiming at, but it didn’t matter; it kept them back from the door, which was all we needed.
Or more or less kept them back. By level eight, the door was dented all over as fists and feet caved in the heavy metal, and by nine it was buckling and by ten there were faces staring at us through gaps big enough to drive body parts through and by eleven enough of those parts had been wedged inside that the elevator shuddered to a halt. I could still hear the gears grinding, trying to take us down, but nothing was happening, and that wasn’t good.
“You have a plan for this, right?” Ray said, not looking at me because he was too busy hacking at body parts with his cleaver. Which wasn’t working so well, because the acid had mostly eaten through the blade.
“Get out of the way!” I told him, hitting the button to go back up.
The sudden reversal, along with a few blasts from the shotgun to clear the door, worked to get us going again. But in the wrong direction. And some of our newfound friends thought we were leaving too soon, because now the floor was starting to dimple, too, as fists and feet hammered at it from underneath.
“How are they holding on?” Ray yelled, firing his rifle as we shot back up, because he’d already emptied my .45.
“Vampires!” I said, knocking him out of the way and grabbing two grenades. I tossed them out the shredded door on level ten, went up to nine, hit stop and waited.
“What the—” Ray began, but I cut him off.
“How many upper-level masters were here?”
“What—I—” His head jerked up as somebody landed on the roof. And somebody else stared at us through the slashes in the door, just two dead eyes that didn’t glow anymore in a darkened corridor.
“Ray!” My voice snapped his attention back to me.
