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All in the name of a sister who hated him with very good reason.
He watched the scientist struggle for breath, measured the change in color of the face… noted the tapping of the fingers on the floor, as if the man were calling for help on an invisible Morse code machine.
Shifting around, Blade looked up into the security camera. Then he reached over his shoulder and pulled out the nozzle that was vertically secured onhis backpack. Initiating the flamethrower, there was a quietwoof!as the equipment came alive, a blue flame kindling at the tip.
He started with the female. He always started with the females, if there happened to be one or several.
How many labs had he destroyed? A dozen, perhaps. In the last twenty-five years.
The flame exploded out of the wand in a stream, and as it hit the mesh, the profile of the yellow blast broadened and quickly consumed the fragile screen. With the barrier gone, the fire reassembled itself, becoming more ray-like.
The burning flesh smelled like meat on a spit.
Blade watched for as long as he could. Then he closed his eyes. When the scent changed, signaling that the skin, muscle, and connective tissue had been consumed, he went to work on the other two. Meanwhile, in the background, on the floor drain, the human slowly expired.
When there was nothing left except for piles of smoking bones below where the bodies had been hung, he extinguished the flame. No alarm went off and no sprinklers rained upon him—a surprise given the heat, although the HVAC system had kept the air mostly clear. This meant either the sensors were broken or the monitoring was for shit.
Or it was a silent alarm and help, such as it would be, was on the way.
Likely the latter, which explained why no extinguishing had occurred.
He stared up at the security camera again.
It was important to make sure the owner of this shit show saw his face clearly, like in a close kill, where you were certain that your prey knew who their murderer was. When he was satisfied that his image had been captured sufficiently, he pivoted to go. The scientist was well and gone, and it was a pity, really. He could have tortured the man with some mind play.
Except he’d been too scattered to enjoy his favorite hobby as soon as he’d seen the bodies in the cages.
As he came up to the exit, he stepped over a pair of corpses. Security guards. After he’d entered the code to get into the unit, they’d jumped out and reached for their handguns. He’d made sure their efforts weren’t wasted. Trespassing into their minds, he’d made them turn their weapons on themselves, those muzzles going right to their frontal lobes.
Bang, bang. Flop. Flop.
At which point the scientist had started screeching.
Blade had looked past the noise, while he’d shot the man in the chest. The vampires had already been hung—and he could only assume that some kind of internal alert had gone off and the executions had been triggered automatically: He’d beenable to still catch the scent of their stress and fear sweat in the air.
Then again, he hadn’t been particularly discreet in his penetration of the lab.
Out in the hall, there were more bodies—more guards in their dark uniforms and their still-holstered weapons. They’d swarmed like flies and been just as easy to swat.
On his way down here, there had been much conversation. Now? No voices. Just the whisper of the HVAC system, an occasional electronic beeping, and dripping.
The latter was from the guards. Lot of leaking from all the bullet holes.
Blade had wanted to stab them all, leave a dozen gold daggers behind. But he’d had to get to work. So he’d used his gun.
“Such a very, truly boring hall, really,” he said as he looked up to a camera pod mounted on the ceiling. “Time for some redecorating.”
Reaching around to the base of his pack, he took out his C4 charges and went for a wander, setting them at regular intervals of fourteen feet, waist height. When he got to the vent through which he’d gained access to the facility, he shook his head.
Those fucking humans were so stupid. They knew enough to wrap the cages in steel—but it never dawned on them to defend their precious torture chamber against infiltration from the ductwork.If they had thought to fortify their heating and cooling system with mesh? He’d have died as he dematerialized down here. But no. In their arrogance, they thought only in one dimension.
Funny, it had been the same in each of the labs. Then again, humans were the same.
Ducking his hand inside his jacket, he took out his cell phone. Each charge was set to the same frequency.
Before he triggered the light show, he paused as something occurred to him. In the last six months, since that fuckup on Deer Mountain, he had found only this one last lab. There appeared to be no others. God knew he had searched for them, using the same channels he always did, yet his endeavors had yielded nothing.
Had he come to the end of his journey? There were fewer vampires after the raids of four years ago, and those who were left were likely to be very, very careful with themselves: Harder to find, harder to capture. Maybe it wasn’t that humans were getting more ethical, they were just running out of subjects.
