Charming (34 page)

“And that destroys it?” Choo asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Destroys it. Heals it. Absorbs it. Releases it. How would I know? It makes the spirit go away.”

“So what happened to Molly?”

“Sounds to me like instead of opening the door and stepping aside, Molly tried to be the source of unconditional love,” I said. “If they were linked, and that thing was making her feel what it felt, and she turned that around and made it feel what she was feeling somehow… and she was forgiving it… yeah, that might have made it pack its bags.”

“Why is Molly all fucked up then?” Choo demanded angrily. “If all she did was give that thing a hug?”

“Because humans aren’t a source of pure unconditional love,” I said. “Even the best of us. We just aren’t.”

“Hell, some of us aren’t human at all,” Choo muttered.

I let that comment hang there for a moment, and then Choo held up his palms and apologized. “Sorry. Remembering that stuff got to me is all. I feel bad about Molly.”

“What about you?” I asked.

He looked at me and his gaze was hot, some dark emotion burning behind it like a coal. “I didn’t forgive that thing, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, I mean, how have you been dealing with what it did to you?”

He gave me a look that could have been ashamed or defiant or amused and pulled a plastic bag full of marijuana buds out of his pocket. “The black man’s Paxil.”

I shook my head.

“What?” he demanded.

“I’m trying to figure out if I’m allowed to call you a racist,” I said.

“No,” he informed me.

“Good to know,” I said.

27

A
t some point in the 1950s the good city of Clayburg stopped using a particular network of utility tunnels. Maybe the city upgraded the way it heated homes or ran wire or diverted water, or made some sort of technological shift so profound that it was cheaper to abandon millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure than to just build new tunnels. Or maybe it wasn’t really necessary, but some congressman got money to start over in order to provide new jobs for his district. If Choo knew the answer, I never asked him. I just assumed that he had discovered the abandoned tunnels in the course of his job as an exterminator, and that’s still the most likely explanation.

What I do know is that we spent two days using one of Clayburg’s old utility tunnels to practice moving underground as a team. Well, maybe
team
is too strong a word for what we were. Sig wasn’t talking to me except in monosyllables, and she made Dvornik look talkative.

Making matters even more awkward, I had told Dvornik that I wasn’t helping him hide things from people who I trusted a hell of a lot more than him even if that wasn’t saying much,
and he had reluctantly told Sig’s war band the truth about his nephews—that the twins who only spoke Croatian in fact spoke flawless English. Molly and Cahill and Choo were still processing the fact that the Dvornik family—and Sig—had been pulling one over on them from the beginning.

Part of me had wanted to move in on the vampire hive immediately, but the wait served two purposes. It gave us a chance to figure out how to work together in tunnels, and it gave Anne Marie and her group time to settle down and believe that I really was some dead and random occurrence after spotting me in their backyard.

The particular tunnel we were using today was big enough to walk through at a slight crouch, and the pipes and ducts running along the sides of the corrugated steel walls hadn’t been maintained in a long time. The concrete floor was covered with at least six inches of compacted mud and rat droppings and trash, formed over years of flooding that had carried silt and debris and rust slush through the tunnel and then abandoned them there.

Andrej had spent several hours booby-trapping the tunnel and then hidden in it. Our designated task was to hunt him down and use the paint guns we were carrying to shoot him with head or heart shots.

I was in the lead of our line. As the scout, I was to find and disable any traps and tell the rest of the team what was what, who was where, and how many of them there were. I would also be the first to engage.

Behind me was Sig. This was partly because she and Molly were the only ones I would trust behind me, but fortunately that never became an issue. Sig was holding a large steel shield in front of her as she moved along. It wasn’t a classic shield that they had gotten from a museum or a historical reenactment
society—the shield was a two-and-a-half-foot-long monster whose bottom tapered into a triangular point. Choo had made it out of a steel door that he had salvaged and/or illegally removed from the husk of a decommissioned navy battleship. Fabric straps would have busted, so he’d had to weld steel rings on the inside that Sig could slip her arm through. No normal person could have carried the shield on one arm, even for three-foot intervals. I could have, but I would have gotten tired fast.

The front of the shield displayed a glowing cross that Molly had painted on it in luminous paint, so that any vampire charging it in a narrow tunnel would come to a dead stop (no pun intended) about ten feet away.

If I was the offensive probe, Sig was the first line of defense.

Third in line was Andro, supposedly the best sniper we had. When I identified a threat, his job was to provide fire support from behind or around or over the cover that Sig would be providing. He was using a Barret .50 caliber rifle now because he had to be reasonably mobile.

Next was Cahill, who was supposed to be pretty quick and accurate with a pistol. He’d had both training and experience in raiding hostile environments—usually apartments and trailers and the occasional meth lab, he’d told me—and Sig had assured me that he had a cool head and steady nerves in stressful circumstances. I never did get the full details on how she knew this.

And last in our insertion team was Choo, who was functioning in a support capacity. He was armed, but he was also carrying extra supplies we might need and had some basic first aid training.

Molly’s job would be to move behind us, covering the tunnel conduit that we cleared with holy symbols so that we would have a place to retreat where the vampires couldn’t go, and so
that no vampires could dig their way behind us from other nearby tunnels.

On the actual raid Dvornik was going to do his out-of-body thing and identify how many vampires we were dealing with and where they were before I went down the tunnel, and this would presumably take him out of the action for a while. He and Andrej would be our reserve force.

We were using night-vision gear that projected a small light from a headband so that the goggles below it could amplify that light and use it to scan the environment beyond. The biggest drawbacks to the goggles were that they identified where we were in the dark, they had limited range, they had no peripheral vision to speak of, and any sudden bursts of light would be doubly blinding, but at least we were able to function.

I sprayed a strand of glow-in-the-dark Silly String into the air and watched as the liquid hardened into a plastic thread, arcing downward before splitting in half on some invisible obstacle. Son of a bitch. I was about fifteen feet away from an exit point, and this was the eighth trip wire I’d found.

“Rupt,” I said, and Sig halted behind me. We had figured out that among us Sig, Andro, and I spoke about ten different languages fairly fluently, but English was the only one we all had in common. Andro knew Latin as well as I did, though, and Sig was familiar with a lot of the roots—her middle school had emphasized them as a way of building vocabulary or something. Anyhow, Sig remembered her Latin roots the same way that a lot of adults still remember their state capitals.

Sig rested the steel shield on the ground and lay down behind it.

Holstering the Silly String, I removed a can of glow-in-the-dark spray paint. I sprayed the area where the Silly String had parted, continuing to spray as an almost microscopically
thin wire appeared in the air as if by magic, glowing ghostlike before me. Surely the vampires wouldn’t have this kind of high-grade monofilament? There was enough room to crawl under the wire, but that wasn’t really an option with a mine planted somewhere in the vicinity.

Unlike with the other trip wires, with this one I was catching a faint whiff of actual TNT. TNT doesn’t mean dynamite sticks, by the way; it stands for trinitrotoluene, and it’s a common ingredient in land mines and improvised explosive devices. Even before Alison died I had made it a point to be familiar with the smells of most explosives. Most poisons too, for that matter. It’s one of the prices I pay for being so popular.

I scooched up a little closer and examined the trip wire. It disappeared into a hole in the side of the rusty corrugated wall and went downward, where it was undoubtedly buried in the silt and attached to the trigger of a land mine. Presumably the land mine was an empty shell and the explosive I was smelling was a lingering chemical trace, but I wouldn’t put it past Andrej to put something painful in place. He was still sore—in both senses of the word—from where I’d taken him out of play in the woods the previous morning.

Was this realistically something I would actually have to deal with in the vampire tunnels? I mean, pits and Punji sticks sure, but land mines? Anne Marie was supposed to be smart, and putting untested explosives where they could bring down untested tunnels would not be smart. On the other hand, you never can tell what amateurs are going to do, and land mines are frighteningly easy to make. I could do it myself with a plastic food container, some wire, four checkers, a pushpin, some explosive propellant, and one or two other items that I could get from a grocery store but won’t mention because I don’t want kids trying this at home.

There are only two practical ways to disable your basic homemade land mine. The safest way is to detonate the mine remotely from a distance. The more dangerous option is to try to disable the trigger. Assuming the trip wire is actually wrapped around the trigger, this would entail uncovering the land mine without touching the wire and moving the mine in the direction that the trip wire is coming from, creating enough slack to cut the trip wire safely or enough distance to crawl by the mine.

Even if I wanted to try to disarm the mine, though, I wouldn’t in real life, so I moved back. I crouched behind Sig and her shield and laid the can of Silly String on my thigh so that she could silently hand me a steam canister that Choo had provided for practice purposes. I didn’t say anything to Sig or to Andro, who was lying on the ground behind me in a classic sniper sprawl. If Andrej had really been a vampire, he would have had enhanced hearing.

This is why all knights learn to sign and read lips. Kresniks learn sign language too, but I had found, to my frustration, that Dvornik and his nephews knew a European variant that I didn’t have time to master. To paraphrase Steve Martin, it’s as if those Europeans have a different word for everything.

I pulled the ring tab on the steam canister and lobbed it overhead toward the fire door. The canister filled the concrete room up with a cloud made out of holy water, and I heard Andrej come running down the tunnel ahead of the cloud, firing his paintball gun as he ran. I had to grin. Andrej was stuck between staying in a cloud that was supposed to be like acid to him, or running down the tunnel and triggering the traps that he himself had set.

That’s what you get for trying to ambush someone with enhanced senses.

Andro had rolled slightly to the right of Sig’s shield and was returning fire, so I moved slightly to the left. I held my gun in my left hand and fired blindly around the shield a few times before peering out, estimating the location of his center of mass from the sound of his footsteps.

I needn’t have bothered. I had hit Andrej in his left thigh and twice in his stomach, but he only had human reflexes and Andro had marked the center of his brother’s forehead with a paintball. This actually pissed me off a little bit. In the real tunnels the vampires would be moving too fast for that kind of fancy shooting. Firing down the middle zone was the best way to slow them down for a proper shot. Whether the shots went high or low, anything that forced vampires off their feet would be a good thing.