I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (38 page)

It was another warm, muggy evening.

“How many you think they’ll show with?” Boone
asked her.

“Who’s to say? Rainford’s a man of his word.
But who knows. Why do you want to know—are you frightened?”

“Nah, I’m just thinking about how many
motherfuckers I get to fuck up tonight.”

“You really like this, don’t you Boone?”

“They killed my friends, Emmanuela. I’m going
to kill all of them. And then I’m going to find Jay and that psycho
bitch he’s protecting and I’m going to cap her ass too.”

“Not if we can help it,” Emmanuela said
honestly.

“What do you want to do, rehabilitate that
fuckin’ thing?” Boone asked. As they walked into the park, the few
people left saw them and saw the weapons they carried and quickly
exited the grounds.

“A lack of understanding of something isn’t a
warrant to kill it.”

“Fuck it. I don’t want to understand it.”

“Don’t imagine that everything you know is
everything there is to know.”

“I never claimed to know shit. Are we alone
here?”

They were walking out into an enormous grassy
expanse. Each corner was a regulation sized baseball field. A
jogging track ringed the fields. The lights of cars zoomed by on
the Long Island Expressway to their left. A row of middle class
residential homes lined the street on the right where they had
parked the Town Car. A gas station and car wash took up most of the
block across the street to their north. The playgrounds, basketball
courts and monkey bars of the park itself stretched off to the
south.

“Isabella is over there,” Emmanuela’s chin
barely moved as she indicated their positions, “and Daniella is up
on those roofs.”

“They’re just going to watch.”

“No, they have sniper rifles.”

“It wasn’t a question.” Boone corrected her.
“They just watch. I’m going to take care of this shit.”

“Well…” they had reached the center of the
field. “We have to wait.”

“I hate waiting.” Boone shifted the M-249 on
its shoulder strap.

Emmanuela cocked her head, listening to the
device in her ear.

“Here they come,” she said to Boone.

He looked where she indicated. Two figures
were walking through the night, crossing the field towards
them.

“Just two?” he asked.

“Like I said, Rainford’s a man of his word.
He said it’d be him and Kreshnik. It’s him and Kreshnik.”

As the two forms got closer Boone could see
them more clearly. The taller of the two carried some kind of
automatic shotgun in one hand, the other wrapped around the
foregrip of a rocket propelled grenade launcher that rested on its
shoulder. The other form walked with its hands empty at its
sides.

“I can understand the street sweeper,” Boone
announced when the other two were close enough to hear, “but what
gives with the rocket launcher?”

“Emmanuela,” greeted Rainford. “How long has
it been?”

“Not long enough.”

“Ah yes, the Commune,” a wistful look crossed
Rainford’s face. “Do you recall the barricade on rue Ramponeau
during La Semaine Sanglante?”

Kreshnik and Boone hadn’t taken their eyes
off each other the entire time.

“It ends tonight,” Emmanuela told Rainford.
“Here.”

“I don’t remember you being so melodramatic,
Emmanuela. The sisterhood has been hunting my kind for—how long
now?”

“Millennia.”

“Hmmm. I see you brought a friend.”

“Hey fuck face. How you doing?”

The Albanian growled.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“The last time I saw you,” recalled Rainford.
“You were holding back your own intestines. Remarkable.”

“Yeah, you and your fagalla the Jew,” Boone
sneered. “I thought you were going to bore me to death you fuckin’
windbag.”

“So you were listening…”

“Did you think we were going to bring a
tank?” Emmanuela asked Rainford, nodding her chin at the RPG that
rested on Kreshnik’s shoulder.

“This…new plaything of yours—” Rainford meant
Boone “—I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

Kreshnik spoke in his language, something
that promised pain. The tall vampire wore a red cape with two black
eagles back to back on it.

“What are you looking at?” Boone asked it.
“You fucks talk too much,” he addressed himself to Rainford and
Emmanuela, then Rainford and Kreshnik. “Which one of you pussies is
first?”

“Rainford is mine,” stated Emmanuela.

“Nah. I’m gonna fuck the old man up just as
soon as I take care of Kreskin here. Yeah,
now
I’m talking
about you bitch!”

Kreshnik emitted a low growl.

“No, Boone.” Emmanuela drew her kukri. “This
has been a long time coming between Rainford and me.”

“Indeed it has,” agreed Rainford. “Why don’t
we let these two have their tete-de-tete first?”

“I don’t think much of being the undercard.”
Boone snarled at Rainford. “I’m done with him, I’m gonna fuck you
up next old man.”

“Your lack of couth nearly outshines your
hubris.”

“Speak English, fag.”

“Wait.” All three males looked at Emmanuela.
She held one hand out, her thumb depressing a button on a
detonator. She’d let the H&K drop on its sling from her
shoulder and unbuttoned her coat, pulling it open to reveal the
explosives vest beneath.

“If I take my thumb off this, we all
die.”

“Again, Emmanuela, these histrionics are
beneath you.”

The Albanian took a step forward, the muzzle
of the auto-shotgun on Boone.

Boone held up a finger and Kreshnik stopped
and watched.Boone shrugged off the strap of the machine gun and
tossed it to the dirt.

“See?” he splayed his hands at his sides. “I
don’t need it.”

The Albanian looked at him quizzically.

“Tell your fuck buddy there,” Boone watched
the tall vampire but addressed his words to Rainford, “me and him,
we gonna settle this the old fashioned way.” Boone settled into a
fighting stance, one leg in front of the other, arms raised in
front of his face.

“Knuckle up, bitch.”

Kreshnik laughed, its chest rising and
falling. It laid the automatic shotgun down on the ground besides
its feet.

“Dumb fuck.” Boone reached behind his back,
drew the Ruger Speed-Six and fired. The shot went wide—

Emmanuela shook her head.

“Your friend—”

—and before Boone could fire a second round,
Kreshnik had sprung forward through the air, landing on him, the
two of them rolling in the dirt.

“—has terrible aim,” concluded Rainford.

The two on the ground grappled before
breaking away from each other.

They crouched, intent on each other. Boone
had heard a line in a movie he always wanted to use in a fight. He
used it now.

“I used to fuck guys like you in prison.”

Kreshnik rushed the man a second time, but
Boone was ready. When the Albanian went to push Boone’s chest, the
man pulled the vampire’s arm and elbow, stepping back, causing
Kreshnik to lose its balance and lean forward. Boone jack hammered
his knee into Kreshnik’s face and head half a dozen times before
pushing the vampire back and away.

Kreshnik shook its head and smiled at Boone.
If it had been human, it would have been a bloody mess.

“This might be interesting,” Rainford said to
Emmanuela as Boone charged Kreshnik.

Boone fought by instinct, his only guiding
thought that he wanted to fuck this vampire up. He rushed right
into the beast, striking it with his elbows and knees, ducking and
blocking what blows he could, absorbing others. He hooked his left
leg behind Kreshnik’s right knee and pummeled the Albanian with his
elbow in the chest and head, knocking the creature down.

Boone didn’t wait for Kreshnik to gain its
feet. He launched himself on the felled beast, striking it
repeatedly with the underside of his fist and elbow.

With a roar, Kreshnik threw Boone off.

Boone landed on his side, rolling to a stop
next to Kreshnik’s automatic shotgun. He scooped it up and straight
armed it as Kreshnik stood, depressing the trigger.

The auto-shotgun barely bucked in his hand as
it fired, the muzzle flashing each time as the twenty round drum
magazine emptied itself. Kreshnik staggered back with each round of
buckshot, shielding its face with an upraised arm. The vampire’s
boonie hat got lost in the dust. When the shotgun locked on an
empty chamber Kreshnik was down on one knee.

“You’re friend is performing considerably
well.”

“He’s not my friend,” replied Emmanuela.

A group of men holding towels from the gas
station/car wash had crossed the street and stood against the chain
link fence, watching the melee.

Boone threw the emptied shotgun off into the
dark.

“What? Not so easy when you’re not hiding in
a coffin, huh?”

Kreshnik stood, one hand brushing off its
cape. The thing reached both hands under the cloak and when it
returned it gripped a
sai
in each.

“I’ve seen them shits before.” Boone
unstrapped a silver tipped stake from each thigh. “Come on-come
on-come on…” He flourished them in each hand before gripping them
firmly.

The two circled one another, each eyeing the
other, completely ignoring the dark Lord and the woman who
watched.

Boone and Kreshnik moved incredibly fast, a
flurry of strikes and parries, of blocks and lunges. When Boone
stepped back he was cut and bleeding in several places and Kreshnik
looked smug.

“Come on-come on-come on…” Boone encouraged
and Kreshnik swept in, the
sai
moving faster than the eye
could see. Boone grunted as one of the weapons entered his abdomen
and lodged there. He managed to brace a stake against the vampire’s
neck, getting behind it, pulling back with all his might.

Kreshnik leaped backwards and the two were at
it again amid the dirt and grass. Rainford and Emmanuela watched,
as did the men across the park at the fence. When the dust cleared
in the light from the overhead lamps, Boone had Kreshnik in a
triangle choke, a knee across the vampire’s neck, his left leg
locking down on the instep of his right foot. His right thigh cut
off Kreshnik’s carotid artery, his right shoulder cut off its right
carotid artery. If he had faced a human opponent, Boone would have
choked it into submission and death in a manner of seconds.

Kreshnik somehow reached around and found the
handle of the
sai
jutting out of Boone’s stomach. Wrenching
the
sai
, the vampire rolled out from under Boone as the
latter screamed in agony, clutching his punctured midsection.

Kreshnik rose and locked its eyes on Boone,
cursing in his language and spitting. It stalked off, away from
Boone, and the wounded man used this as an opportunity to get up on
his knees and then his feet.

When Boone turned, Kreshnik was shouldering
the RPG and aiming it at him.

“Fuck!” Boone went to run, stepping on one of
his discarded stakes, which rolled under his foot. He collapsed as
Kreshnik fired, the rocket streaking over Boone’s prone form.

“Oh dear,” murmured Rainford as the rocket
broke through the fence ringing the park and impacted one of the
pumps at the gas station. The warhead exploded and then the
gasoline reservoirs under the ground ignited. The men watching the
fight against the fence evaporated as the chain link fence itself
disappeared.

Emmanuela shook her head.

Kreshnik stared at the fireball blossoming in
the night like a child staring at fireworks. Boone rushed the
vampire, shooting in low, wrapping his arms around Kreshnik’s upper
thighs, using his momentum to lift the vampire into the air. He
slammed it to the dirt and yanked the emptied tube from its
fingers.

“I would not have believed this,” Rainford
spoke to Emmanuela, watching as Boone repeatedly pummeled the
felled vampire with the body of the RPG. “Astounding, utterly
astounding. You know, by all rights, this man should be dead.”

“We’re running tests on his blood now,”
confided Emmanuela. “It’s a pity I won’t be able to share the
results with you.”

“It’s a pity you will not be able to see them
yourself.”

Boone’s head snapped back, Kreshnik’s booted
foot connecting with his jaw. He staggered backwards, shaking the
stars out of his head. When he had cleared his vision enough to
see, he saw Kreshnik standing there, Boone’s own M-249 grasped in
both of the vampire’s hands, leveled at him.

“Ah shit…”

The vampire said something and then fired but
the light machine gun did not respond.

Kreshnik looked down. The box magazine had
come detached and lay at the vampire’s feet.

Kreshnik cursed.

Stash
, thought Boone, tackling the
Albanian.

“How long do you suppose this can continue?”
Rainford asked Emmanuela. The street across from the park was a
raging inferno.

The man and the vampire were beating each
other mercilessly, their shadows dancing on the ground. Boone bled
from the face, nose and mouth. Kreshnik, because of its nature, did
not bleed. Yet the vampire looked worn.

“Ohhh…” Rainford winced as Kreshnik’s gloved
hand broke Boone’s nose. “Tsk, tsk, tsk…”

Boone staggered back, his nose flat against
his cheek. His right eye was blackened and closing. Blood from the
gash above it blinded him. His midsection screamed up at him from
where the
sai
had penetrated and he thought he had a few
broken ribs again.

“Emmanuela,” he called to the nun,
“blade.”

She tossed him the kukri, wondering if Boone
could see well enough to catch it or if it’d wind up in his chest.
He caught it.

“Thanks,” he muttered through a mouthful of
blood and loose teeth.

Backlit by the roaring fire, Kreshnik rose to
its full height and stretched its arms, its cape temporarily
blocking out the flame. The vampire reached its left hand to its
right and peeled off the tight leather glove, revealing the
gnarled, clawed hand.