Vampire Apocalypse: A World Torn Asunder (Book 1) (15 page)

He’s playing with us! Reiss
glanced up again at the brightening sky.

Three men remained standing.
Reiss looked around frantically for something to shoot at. Then the
man to his left simply disappeared as if the floor had swallowed
him whole. Reiss ran straight at the only other figure left
standing. Just before he reached the man, a dark shape suddenly
appeared between them. He got a quick impression of a pale face and
impossibly long teeth, and then he felt the impact.

Reiss crashed into the vampire.
Both of them went reeling across the room and hit the wall hard.
Reiss felt the wind driven from his lungs. He slid to the ground
and lay gasping on all fours. His chest hurt where he had collided
with the vampire and he forced himself to take small breaths to
ease the pain. Dust filled the air and Reiss cried out when the
chalky dryness forced him to cough. Fresh pain racked his body, but
it served to focus his mind. He suddenly remembered the vampire and
he looked up frantically as he searched for where it had gone. He
saw the creature across the room impaled on the remains of the
boards covering the window where Perkins” body still lay over the
sill. It had gotten stuck at an awkward angle till now but was just
now pulling itself free as Reiss regained his feet.

Despite the multiple punctures
it had received the creature merely grinned as it pulled itself
away from the wooden shards with a sickening, wet sound and Reiss
was frozen to the spot in terror. Suddenly, it stopped, shuddered,
and then howled as a large hole appeared through its upper body.
The hole expanded and blood poured from the wound in torrents.
Reiss watched as more holes began to appear until the whole body
came apart and literally melted in front of him.

“What the hell?” Reiss
exclaimed. His mind raced, and then the first tendrils of sunlight
pushed against the shadows around the window as they crept into the
room.

Of course, he thought, sunrise,
and not a minute too soon.

Reiss looked around and sighed
in relief when some of his men began to rise from where they had
fallen.

“Thank God he was playing with
us, eh?” The question came from Rodgers, who was the only man who
hadn’t been attacked. Reiss looked over at the young man. He was
tall, that was the first thing anyone noticed about Rodgers, that
and his idiotic grin of course. Reiss considered himself a good
height at 6-foot-2, but he had to look up to this kid. He couldn’t
be more than twenty-five, Reiss thought, and had to smile himself
when he saw Rodgers break into another wide grin.

“Can I ask you a question?”
Rodgers asked.

“Go ahead.”

“How did you know he’d go for me
next?”

“I didn’t.”

Just then the door to the
basement burst open and thralls poured in.

Bullets flew everywhere and both
sides dove for cover. Rodgers staggered back, clutching his left
arm, and collapsed against the stairs. Reiss felt a bullet fly past
his cheek before he was able to move and he brought up his own
weapon and fired a sustained burst blindly towards the thralls
before leaping behind the nearest cover. Two of the guards were
caught in the hail and they pirouetted wildly with each impact.

“Shit!” Reiss looked at his
watch again. The two-hour window restriction and the threat of
reinforcements from other barracks made the timing of this whole
operation very tight. The nearest barracks of any size was twenty
miles across town and they had factored in a twenty-five-minute
response time.

That left only ten more minutes
before they would be over-run.

Chapter 14

Scott Anderson and his group
kept to the shadows while they ran through the city. The area was
completely deserted, but they could see an occasional building with
lights on and decided that they’d play it safe. The sounds of
fighting still raged behind them, and they had seen at least one
patrol on their way to the battle. Their group was too small to
successfully carry out an ambush, so they could only hide and watch
helplessly while the patrol passed by.

They came to the hospital
grounds shortly after that and entered over the wall to the east of
the building. Scott led his group across the overgrown grounds to
the main wing. The night was still full dark and dawn was some
fifteen minutes away when he saw the glow of a cigarette by the
door. He jumped to the ground and tackled his brother, who hadn’t
seen the sentry. Both of the men hit the grass hard.

“What?” Bill began, but stopped
immediately when he saw his brother motion for silence and point to
the hospital entrance. Two thralls stood in front of the main
door.

“Oh shit,” Bill whispered. “Not
as abandoned as we’d hoped, huh?”

“There must be something mighty
important in there for them to have stayed with that racket going
on back there.” Pritchard nodded towards the sounds of fighting
behind them.

Scott nodded his agreement.
“We’ll have to find another way in.”

The sound of breaking glass
seemed to fill the night. Each member of the small group cringed at
the noise and seemed to hold their breaths as they strained to hear
any sound of response.

“Careful,” Scott Anderson looked
balefully at his brother who merely shrugged and pursed his
lips.

“Do you want to take over?” Bill
looked indignant, but he continued to remove the sharp fragments
from the window frame and throw them onto the grass behind him. The
two brothers were famous for their quick tempers, but everyone knew
that the constant sparks that flew between them were purely
cosmetic.

The group had spent the last ten
minutes looking for an alternative entrance, but the building had
proved to be more of a fortress than a hospital. Finally, they had
come across a small window set below ground level in a small hollow
and, as it was the only window that didn’t have light coming from
within, they had decided to make their entry from there. Even
though the window was in a strange depression they still had to dig
a small trench around the area just to get at it properly.

“Who the fuck puts a window
below ground?” Bill asked no-one in particular as he ripped at the
ground with his bare hands and cursed every few seconds as small
stones tore at his skin.

“Not what you’d expect from an
abandoned hospital is it?” Pritchard whispered. “We’ll have to
hurry; the sun is starting to come up.”

Both brothers turned and gave
Pritchard a withering look.

“You think?” the brothers
replied with a sneer.

“Okay, I was just reminding
you.” Pritchard said defensively and then turned away as if
uncomfortable with the brothers” stares.

Finally Bill finished and pulled
himself through the narrow opening and into the room. The rest of
the group waited nervously outside, all of them riveted on the
small, dark opening. After what seemed an eternity, Bill Anderson’s
face appeared and he motioned for them to follow. The room beyond
was tiny and it barely held the whole group as they assembled
within. Scott was last in and immediately joined his brother by the
door.

“Locked!” Bill Anderson spat out
the word like a curse.

“Of course,” Scott sighed. “This
night just gets better and better. Next we’ll find half the
vampires in the city on the other side of the door.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” warned
Hackett as he pushed them aside and bent down to examine the lock.
He grunted and then took a small wallet from his pocket and took
two tiny metal tools from within and began to fiddle with them in
the lock. The tools looked tiny in the grip of his huge hands but,
within a few seconds, there was a muffled clunk and he suddenly
stood up grinning. He looked sheepish when he noticed the others
staring at him. “Result of a rather colourful youth, I’m
afraid.”

Scott smiled and opened the door
just far enough to look into the corridor. “Well, at least the
vampires didn’t turn up,” he said before he opened the door fully
and stepped out.

“Not yet, you mean,” Bill
answered gloomily and followed him out.

“What are we looking for?” John
Pritchard asked when the group had reached the end of the
corridor.

Scott was about to respond when
Jenny White interrupted.

“We used to keep the supplies in
the basement before the vampires took over, so let’s start there,”
she said and moved to take the lead. This was the first time she
had made her presence felt within the group and Scott assumed that
the familiar surroundings of the wards gave her confidence. The
corridor was dimly lit by the first rays of the new dawn coming in
through the window behind them. Scott felt very exposed in the open
area and kept glancing around as if expecting company.

They passed numerous rooms, all
of which were closed and locked. Scott paused to look through the
glass partition of a few of the doors, but could see nothing other
than empty beds stretching back into the darkness.

“This is getting weird,” he
thought. “Why clean up and lock all the rooms? Why are there guards
out front?”

Every other building not used by
the thralls had been left to deteriorate; even the ones where
people still lived were slums. The serum ensured that the populace
was kept in line, but it also ensured that people did not even have
enough free will to make their surroundings comfortable. Scott
shook himself back to reality and hurried after the group.

They reached a door emblazoned
with a sign that depicted a stairwell. When they entered, they had
to stop briefly and wait for their eyes to adjust to the
darkness.

“Damn!” said Scott Anderson. “We
have to hurry. We’re due back at the wall in twenty minutes and we
haven’t found so much as a condom yet.” He retook the lead and
proceeded down the stairs. The enclosed space and the lack of light
weighed heavily on the group. The short distance to the basement
seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, but, finally, Scott
felt the door handle and gripped it as a drowning man would a
lifeline. He turned the handle slowly and opened the door.

The basement was illuminated so
brightly that he was totally blinded when he opened the door. Spots
swam in his vision and he closed the door rapidly and waited
precious seconds as he waited for his eyes to recover.

“There’s someone down here,” he
whispered. “There are more lights on down here than in Times
Square.”

The group readied their weapons
and this time opened the door a crack to allow their eyes to
adjust. Once they were ready they slipped out one by one into the
corridor.

The door opened out onto a long
corridor. To the left it continued on for another two hundred
yards, with many rooms dotted along its length, and culminated in
what seemed to be a dead end. All the doors were closed and dark.
To the right there were double swing doors and, through these, a
large open-plan room. The swing doors had small, in-built glass
partitions, just like the wards. Scott Anderson crouched just below
the partitions and peeked inside.

He could see two men in white
coats. One was bent over a machine and the top of his bald head
shone brightly in the fluorescent lighting. The second sat at a
desk writing. Scott pushed the door open with the barrel of his
machine gun and checked out the rest of the room.

The room’s stark, neat
efficiency was in total contrast to the rest of the city. The work
surfaces were clear, except for neatly ordered rows of phials and
bottles. In the far corner there was a large collection of
cardboard boxes. Anderson leaned in further and caught a glimpse of
three more people busily filling the boxes with bottles. The
workers were obviously drugged. They shuffled from the boxes to the
table where the bottles were stored.

The serum! The thought leapt
into Scott’s mind. Of course! That explains the security on the
door. This is where they make it. We’ve hit the mother load.
Without further delay Anderson motioned the others to follow and
entered the room. “Okay, move away from the desks and put your
hands behind your heads.”

The loud voice startled the men
in the white coats and they froze like deer caught in a car’s
headlights and stared at the armed group that entered the room.
Scott moved toward the men and the other four spread out to look
for supplies they could use.

John Pritchard approached the
three workers who stood rigid with fear and tried to calm them.
Jenny White raced around the room and pulled boxes and bottles into
a bag, yelping with pleasure when she recognised certain items.
Scott moved across to the cardboard boxes and looked down at the
large, litre-sized bottles. The green liquid even looked evil. That
was the only way he could describe it--evil.

“This bottle contains the single
most devastating weapon against humanity,” he said.

By the time the humans had
accepted the real threat of the vampires, the creatures had
controlled half the country. However, they were, and still
remained, a creature of stealth. The vampires were devastating at
night; they cleaved their way through flesh and armour with wild
abandon. Bullets and grenades proved useless against their
ever-increasing numbers. The military wasn’t prepared for such an
enemy and lost ground easily to the ravaging horde.

However, the acceptance of this
threat, along with increasing public knowledge, finally began to
hurt the vampires. A new type of war began to emerge: one of
pitched battles with huge numbers on either side. And the humans
had the advantage of a full twenty-four-hour day. The fact that the
vampires were completely defenceless during the day had really
begun to hurt them. Any advances they made at night were quickly
lost during the day when they had to retreat to their darkened
sanctuaries. Even the introduction of huge numbers of thralls only
slowed down the inevitable and the humans had slowly begun to claw
back their territory.