The Regulators - 02 (24 page)

We followed the footprints to the landing in between floors.

There were more prints on the landing. Judging by the new
prints, there were at least five or six kids running around the hotel. All of
them were barefoot, and some of them were very small.

Pitt was the first one to notice the bodies at the top of
the next floor. There were ten couples lying side by side along the hallway.
The soft light on this floor was flickering on and off rather badly. I wasn’t
sure how long it would hold so I told everyone to have their flashlights handy
just in case. I figured that the flashlights would be better than the NVG’s if
the lights suddenly came back on.

I shined my light at the corpses. It wasn’t hard to tell the
cause of death. All of them were covered in savage bite marks.

“They haven’t been eaten,” Fox said.

“No, but they’ve been chewed on,” Pitt said.

“That’s not the point,” Fox said. “Zombies don’t just take a
bite out of someone. They devour their victims. Whatever did this just took a
bunch of bites out of them.”

“Maybe they were all bitten and infected yet somehow escaped
and came up here to die,” Voodoo said.

“If that was the case, we’d be dealing with ten zombies
instead of ten corpses,” I said. “Somebody check for head wounds.”

Fox immediately took up the task of manipulating the bodies
in an effort to search for any damage to the heads. There wasn’t any, but that
wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was how light and brittle the bodies
actually were.

“It feels like they’re hollow or something,” Fox said.

The lights finally went out.

All of us immediately lit our flashlights. That’s when we
noticed the little girl in the nightgown standing at the other end of the
hallway. She couldn’t have been older than six years, and her dark greasy hair
was covering most of her face. The most disconcerting thing was the odd way in
which her back was arched forward and her hanging arms were absolutely still.

“Little girl,” Pitt said. “Don’t be afraid. We’re here to
help you.”

“I want mother’s milk,” the little girl responded in a voice
much too low to come from a child.

Pitt began to approach her, but I didn’t like the situation
at all and told him to pull back.

“She’s probably just traumatized,” Pitt replied as he slowly
walked to the little girl.

“I want mother’s milk,” the little girl repeated.

At that moment, there was an urgent voice shouting into my
earpiece. I couldn’t understand what they were saying at first, but they were
definitely upset about something. It was our Colonel, I could tell that much,
but he was shouting and the higher decibels caused a static over his words.

“Repeat that,” I said after tapping my earpiece. “Lower your
voice, I can’t make out what you’re saying.”

The lights came back on. Pitt was right next to the little
girl and bending down to look her in the face.

The Colonel’s voice came through my earpiece once again. I
could tell that he was forcing himself to remain calm and deliberate.

“Make a full retreat,” he said. “That hotel is a trap. It’s
filled with hostiles.”

“I read you,” I replied. “We’ll grab the girl and boogie.”

“Negative,” the Colonel ordered with that same strained
voice. “She’s a hostile.”

“What?” I asked.

“She’s a vampire.”

For a second I thought I was the victim of a cruel joke. A
vampire? You gotta be kidding me. Then I realized that I was in a city overrun
with zombies, and suddenly the idea of a vampire wasn’t too farfetched.

I looked over towards Pitt. I wanted to shout out for him to
get away from the little girl, but her dead eyes locked onto mine as a black bile
leaked from her mouth and she reached out for Pitt to pick her up. She wasn’t
human. My warning, when it finally came, was way too late. Her jaw actually
unhinged just as she wrapped her skinny arms around his neck. Her mouth was
filled with fangs, horrible jagged, nasty fangs.

The lights went out.

In a panic, I fumbled for my light. I heard Pitt scream. I
heard a deep throated growl echo up and down the hallway, and then I heard
other voices. They were the voices of children.

“I’m thirsty.”

“Mother’s milk.”

“Come play with us.”

“Mother’s milk.”

“I don’t want the light to come back on.”

“I get to drink first.”

The lights flickered on before my panicked hands could turn
on my flashlight. The little girl had fastened herself onto Pitt’s neck. He was
thrashing around the narrow hallway in an effort to get her off, but it wasn’t
working. I didn’t have a clear shot. I could do nothing but pull my knife and
run to his aid.

Worst of all, behind the two combatants and at the other end
of the hallway, were the children. They were slowly pouring into the hallway
from the T-section at the other end. All of them had the same lifeless eyes.

The lights went out.

I heard the footsteps, they were moving fast. I again
reached for my light. This time I found it, but not before one of my teammates
got to theirs first. Pitt was down. He was no longer struggling. He was
surrounded by a mass of tiny bodies. I could hear the slurping sounds as they
drank his blood.

The lights came back on.

There were more children. They were rushing past Pitt’s
body. All of them were barefoot. All of them had that black bile leaking from
their mouths.

The lights went off.

I heard sounds on the walls and ceiling. We aimed our lights
in that direction. Some of the children began scaling the walls on all fours in
an effort to pass the children up front. They were actually competing with each
other to be the first one to reach us.

I started firing.

I was shooting them off the walls. Scalp was next to me; at
least I think it was Scalp. He was firing at them as well.

I heard a child’s laugh come from above my head.

I raised my light towards the ceiling and looked up. Above
me, clutching to the ceiling with his little baby hands and feet was a child
even younger than the little girl that attacked Pitt. He was smiling as his
bottom jaw distended far beyond the reaches of anything even remotely human. He
then launched himself on top of me.

I dropped my light.

The hallway became a cacophony of screams and roars. I
fought like hell. I couldn’t even reach my weapon. In order to do so, I would
have had to let go of the evil child clawing at the bite proof suit I was
wearing.

I just wish that we all had our vests zipped up all the way.
If we had, Pitt may not have had his throat torn out.

I don’t know how I did it; I really couldn’t see shit, but
somehow I threw the child away from me. After that, I ran down the hallway. I
had no intentions of leaving my team. That’s something guys like me just don’t
do, but I needed space in order to regroup and get back into the game.

The lights came back on as I reached the T-section. Scalp
and Voodoo were somehow right behind me. I turned around and prepared to fire.
Fox was pinned against the wall by about ten of the children. They had already
ripped through his bite suit with their teeth and claws. He wasn’t moving.

I began to fire upon the children. I was even able to knock
some of them off of Fox. It was a bad move on my part. I had gotten their
attention, and they rushed towards the three of us in response. It was a pretty
horrible sight watching all those little bodies crawling on the walls and
ceiling. I doubt I will ever get that image out of my head.

We had no choice but to leg it out of there.

Unfortunately, we had gotten twisted around and instead of
heading towards the exit, we had no choice but to run deeper into the hotel.
They were on us and in between us so quickly that Voodoo got lost in the chaos
and ended up running the opposite way from us down the T-sectioned hallway.

Most of the demonic children followed him for some reason.
Scalp and I were able to eventually lose the two or three that trailed after us
by shooting and running.

Eventually, we made it up to what I believe was the third
floor. Both of us had lost our earpieces and Scalp had even lost his helmet. Both
of us had zipped up the collars on our vests in order to protect our throats,
but from what I’d seen I doubted that the collars would hold up for an
extremely long time.

Scalp was trying different doors. He wanted to find an
unlocked one. Breaking down a door would give the little bastards an easier
time if they chose to come in after us. About the eighth knob he turned, he
found what he was looking for and we both just about tumbled inside.

“What the hell are those things?” Scalp asked.

“Vampires,” I answered. “The Colonel told me right before
everything went to shit.”

“We need to find a way out of here,” Scalp said.

I went to the only window in the room. It had bars on the
outside. Why a window this high up would need bars on the outside, I had no
idea.

“Well,” I said. “We can’t go down. We’d never make it out.
My only idea is that we try to go up and get to the roof. Maybe we can figure
out a way down from there.”

“Sounds like a plan. Do you wanna go now, or do you wanna
wait for things to die down a bit?”

“Let’s wait it out and see what happens,” I answered. “We
may actually end up hoofing it out of the city if we don’t find a radio.”

“We’ve been through worse,” Scalp said, but the truth of the
matter was that we had never been through worse.

Fox had carried a computer and GPS, but Fox was down, and
his body was surrounded by an enemy that was immune to our gunfire. Things were
indeed looking bleak. I was trying to think of something. I was trying to plan
something; I’m not sure what. I guess I was hoping to figure out a way to make
contact with our people and arrange a pick up.

Anyway, that’s what I was doing when Scalp headed into the
bathroom. I heard his low whistle and joined him at once. The bathroom was dark
so I hit the filthy switch on the wall and a garish light bathed the room at
once.

Scalp pointed towards the tub.

The pale green bathtub was filled with watery blood. It was
a pretty nasty sight made even worse by the pale little arm floating at the
top. We couldn’t see the rest of the body because it was submerged in the
bloody water, but what we saw was more than enough to make us nervous.

“This might be a food source,” I said.

“Think we should leave?’

“Might be a good idea,” I answered.

I turned off the light and both of us headed towards the
door of the room. Outside the door we heard footsteps running up and down the
hallway. Judging by the voices, it sounded as if the vampire children were
playing a game of hide and seek with each other.

“We can’t go out there,” I said.

“Hell no,” Scalp replied as he listened to one of the
children counting down from one hundred.

“We’re gonna be screwed if one of them tries to hide in
here,” I said.

“We’re gonna be screwed if one of them gets hungry and comes
in here looking for a snack,” Scalp said.

Just then we heard a gurgle come from the bathroom and both
of us became immediately quiet.

“We should check that out,” Scalp said.

“I agree,” I replied. “But I have a feeling that I’m not
going to like what comes out of that bathtub.”

“Then let’s get it before it comes out,” Scalp said as he
drew out his combat knife.

I drew out my knife as well. I didn’t exactly want to get
that close to one of those things, but I knew that bullets had little effect,
and I really had nothing to lose by trying a blade.

I hit the bathroom light just as we walked into the room.
Nothing had changed outside the bathtub, but the bloody water inside the tub
was gently sloshing about. The pale arm was still visible. Fortunately, it
appeared the same.

“We can either wait,” I said. “Or you can reach in there and
drain the water.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Scalp asked.

“How about pull the arm and see what comes up?” I asked.

“Waiting sounds like a pretty good idea to me,” Scalp said.

We didn’t have to wait long. It was maybe five minutes
before we saw the arm twitch and heard another gurgle. A few seconds after that
and the little boy that owned the arm erupted out of the bloody water. He was a
vampire obviously, his dead looking eyes convinced us of that immediately.

The boy was young, maybe about four years old. He was
wearing droopy SpongeBob underpants. He seemed confused as he looked from Scalp
to me and back again.

“Where’s my Mama?” the little boy asked.

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “Why don’t you just wait here
while we go and find her?”

I don’t know why I didn’t just attack the boy, by all rights
I should have. I think it was the confusion in his eyes. That and his lack of
aggression towards us just made it too difficult. Instead, Scalp and I backed
slowly out of the room while the kid stood in that filthy water just staring at
us with those lifeless eyes.

As soon as we were out of the room, I slowly started to
close the door. I looked back towards Scalp, I was telling him something, but I
don’t remember what. I just remember his eyes going wide and when I turned back
towards the door to see what had startled him, I was shocked to see the little
boy at the door.

“I’m thirsty,” the dripping child said.

“I will go look for your Mother,” I replied. “I just want
you to stay in the bathroom and be safe.”

“You smell good,” said the boy.

My heart probably skipped a beat or two when he said this.
Whatever innocence the child still possessed after waking up in the bloody
bathtub was rapidly vanishing. The nature of the beast was beginning to take
over.

“Pick me up,” little boy said as he reached out his arms.