SEAL Team 13 (SEAL Team 13 series) (24 page)

A sharp crack was next, and then the affected figures began to fall apart as they overbalanced and their legs were snapped off from the force. They hit the ground like glass statuettes, sending frozen shards scattering across the floor.

“Holy shi—” Rankin looked between the girl and the zombie shards, eyes wide as he seemed to reconsider where he should be aiming his rifle.

“Later,” Masters growled. “Stay focused.”

Rankin nodded, lifting his M4 to his shoulder as he drew a sight line on the closest figure. “Right. At least you didn’t tell me to stay
frosty
.”

Masters laughed as he looked through the optics of his AA-12 and stroked the trigger to send a Remington rifled slug down range, blowing bone and decomposing brain matter across the room. “Well, it’s a target-rich environment! Take ’em down!”

This sucks.

Alexander Norton was not having what one might call a good day. Actually, the more he thought on it, the more he was convinced that this whole week had sucked, and it was probably not an auspicious start to the winter season.

He was a sight more than passing fair with a blade; in fact, he could quite comfortably claim to a be a master. The creature he was facing at the moment, however, was fast enough and strong enough that he was far from certain that skill would win the day. Not skill with a blade at least.

Nursing bruised ribs, Alexander picked himself up off the roof of the enclosure where he’d been thrown. Leaping away from the strike had prevented him from suffering broken ribs, but he’d barely been able to nick the vampire in return.

Even as he got up, she was smirking at him with a grin as infuriating as it was disturbing.

“Poor little Arcanus. Can’t quite get your power…up?” she asked, her voice laced with innuendo.

Alex shuddered. “If you don’t mind, could we just get on with the killing-each-other part? Sexual jokes from a walking corpse that smells like the ass end of hell really creep me out.”

The vampiress snarled, her expression changing from mildly taunting to horrifically twisted in an instant before she charged again.

Norton sidestepped, slashing his blade across her arm. It drew a line of black fluid across her outstretched limb, but she spun into the strike, and a blindingly fast backhand came in toward him.

He stepped into the blow, driving the cross into her shoulder with his off hand to soften it, but when the hit landed, it still sent sparkles of light through his vision. She hissed in pain, roaring as she slammed her arms down on the base of his neck in an ax-handle blow that drove him to the ground so hard that he bounced.

She stood over him, snarling as he lay there, then idly kicked away the cross and the knife before bending down and picking him up by the back of his neck with one hand.

“Arcanus. You were not meant to fight like gutter trash,” she hissed into his slumped face. “Why, I wonder, would you forsake the power you so obviously hold?”

Norton shook slightly, his laughter rising up over the sound of the generators. He slowly lifted his head and looked at her, causing her to hiss in surprise when she saw that his eyes were black within black.

“I don’t forsake my power, bitch,” he growled, his voice reverberating with barely constrained power. “I just know that power has a cost, but since you asked so nicely, here’s a taste of what I hold.”

Before she could react, he slammed his hands into her in a double-palm strike, and she was lifted clear off the ground. Her hands were torn from his clothes, and she was flung over fifty feet away, tumbling along the roof of the next generator enclosure. She scrambled to her feet as quickly as she could, but Norton was already on the move. He sprinted to the edge and leapt across the gap with arms outstretched, like a raptor diving.

He landed within a few feet of her, having cleared the twenty-foot gap with ease and then some before his feet touched down. She lifted her arms to defend herself against him, but was slammed into the ground by a single fist that drove her to the ground.

Norton followed up with a stomp to break her skull, but she rolled clear just before his boot cracked the cement. He chased after her, kicking out again and again, but she rolled clear each time. Norton found himself growing irritated, his anger rising with each missed strike, when his target suddenly rolled to a stop on her back and caught his boot as he brought it down.

Norton tried to wrench loose, but the vampire held on, grinning at him from her back.

“Impressive, Arcanus.” She laughed. “But you’re still fighting like gutter trash.”

She growled, twisting his foot hard and shoving it upward. To prevent his ankle from being ground into powder, Alex rolled with the power and was thrown up and around. He landed about forty feet away, near the edge, and shoulder-rolled back to his feet.

“Why are you here?” Norton demanded as he squared off against her again. “I expected you to be a fresh rising, but you’re too powerful, and you know the old words. You did not rise here.”

She snarled, baring her teeth. He could see her shriveled gums had long since pulled back, making the teeth look large and protruding.

“I woke here four nights past, I think,” she growled. “With no sun, I cannot be sure.”

Norton’s mind reeled. On the one hand, the answer made sense, but it created new questions rather than resolving anything. He felt his control slipping, the power in his voice breaking as he frowned, genuinely puzzled.

“Then you don’t know how you got here?”

“No,” she growled, flashing forward, “and it hardly matters. It is time for you to die.”

Norton barely had time to curse before she was on him. He got an arm block up against the first hit, but was out of position and took the full brunt of the strike. It lifted him off the ground and threw him back several feet, barely leaving him standing as he struggled to get his guard back up.

She blew through his defenses as though his arms were made of tissue paper, hammering him with blow after blow. Norton gritted his teeth, but kept putting his forearms up to protect his head and torso from the potentially lethal hits.

That softened the strikes, but didn’t stop them. He felt a rib crack, a distinctive pain like a knife driving right through his body. He hissed, trying to block the pain, but there were limits to what he could accomplish while under direct attack, even with his considerable talents.

Norton roared, filthy words rolling off his tongue. He barely had any idea what he was saying, but it made him feel better, and he stepped into the attack and swung back as hard as he could.

She just sneered at him, taking the hit evenly across the face, and then looking him in his black eyes.

“Too little. Too late.”

“Oh shit,” Norton swore, recognizing the shift in her stance as she went into motion.

The fist rocked his head to one side, and the follow-up keeled him over as all the air rushed out of his lungs. He never even saw the knee coming up to meet his face before the whole world became a rush of wind, pain, and blackness.

Hawk Masters slammed the buttstock of his AA-12 into a frozen body that was blocking his way, sending shards of ice and gore to the ground at his feet as he brought the weapon back to his shoulder and opened up.

That little girl scares me.

He emptied the last of his slugs into the attacking horde, aiming past the ones closest to him to get the most out of his last few really decent long-range munitions. His backup didn’t fail him, however, and the creatures closest to him went down hard in a hail of double-aught buckshot that mangled their faces.

He let the drum fall, and it clattered off the cement floor as he reached for a replacement. There was only buckshot left, but it was better than nothing.

Masters was reloading when a blur of motion from above caught his attention. He glanced up in time to see a body slam into the railing of the catwalk. He recognized Norton almost instantly, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he prepared to watch his friend fall the more than thirty feet to the cement below.

Somehow, miraculously, Norton had managed to hook his arms over the railing, however. Now he was hanging there by the arms, head slumped into his chest. Honestly, Masters didn’t know if his friend was dead or alive, but that didn’t change what he had to do.

“Eddie!” he called, getting the master chief’s attention. When Rankin looked over, Masters just nodded up. “Look.”

The tough-as-nails SEAL did as he was asked, and instantly paled to match Masters’s own pasty complexion. “Holy sh—! Is that Alex?”

“Yeah, and I need a way up there,” Masters growled.

“You want to try taking on something that can kick Alex’s ass?” Eddie asked, incredulous. “Are you out of your idiot mind?”

“ ‘Want’ is a strong word, Eddie’ ” Masters said. “ ‘Need’ might be more accurate.”

“Need all you want, the damned stairs are clogged with these bastards,” Eddie roared over the report of his M4, “so unless you can jump like Alex, you ain’t getting up there.”

Masters growled in frustration, his eyes locked on the flood of inhumanity they were just barely holding at bay. The unstable undead had now reached the point of tripping over their own fallen comrades, and since they clearly had a hard enough time stumbling around on even ground, it was proving to be a major stumbling block for them.

Pun not intended.

That said, there were still too many of the damned things in the room, and they were clogging up every path he could take to the stairs. Alex was still slumped there, hanging off the walkway, but
Masters didn’t see any way he could get to him from where he was. The stairwells were literally clogged with the shambling creatures that were attacking them.

“Stop thinking like you’re some kind of superhero, Hawk!” Eddie shouted at him. “You and I both know there’s no way you’re getting up those stairs.”

Masters didn’t bother replying, even though every permutation he could think of was coming back with exactly the same numbers his friend was trying to hammer home. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try, however.

“Yo! Goth girl!” he called over the noise, gaining the attention and the ire of the woman in question.

She glared at him for a moment before speaking, her voice shockingly soft considering that he was able to hear every syllable she uttered.

“The name,” she said clearly and distinctly, “is Hannah.”

He ignored the chill her tone sent down his spine and nodded toward the closest stairwell. “I need some of that ice voodoo you do.”

She scowled at him again, but looked over in the direction he’d indicated. “Fine. I can only freeze a couple, though.”

“Not them,” he shook his head. “Can you do the stairs?”

“The…,” she trailed off, eyes shifting slightly before she nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

“Do it,” he ordered.

“What are you going to do?” she demanded as she brought her fingers up to her forehead.

He shrugged with a bit of a silly grin as he tensed to move. “I’m going to play superhero.”

Hannah shook her head, but focused on the target as Masters broke into a sprint for the stairwell.

“
Freeze
,” she intoned, gesturing out and sending a pulse out ahead of her.

Mist and ice swirled through the air, narrowly missing Masters as he sprinted toward the stairs and the inhuman mass that waited for him there. The bolt struck the metal of the catwalk stairwell, instantly dropping the temperature well below freezing. As it froze, moisture wicked out of the air and condensed onto the metal, transforming instantly into ice.

The vampires weren’t the most stable creatures under the best of circumstances, and when the surface under their feet decided to become slick, it took very little for the first to topple and turn into a domino that began to bring down every other being around it.

Masters hit the writhing mass at a full sprint, leaping over the first few and planting a foot into the chest of one of the figures, using it as a jumping-off point. He made it halfway up the stairwell before a clawing hand got a grip on his ankle and he pitched forward.