Protect All Monsters (27 page)

“And burn this place down?” Jessica shook her head. “Then we’d all burn. But I like your idea, Addey. Let’s break into those rooms and kill whatever’s in there and find what we can.”

Cynthia said hesitantly, “It sounds like a good place to start.”

Todd was in total agreement. “How about four to a room? That should be a fair fight. We’ll take them out that way.”

The people in the room grouped themselves into fours. Addey chose to be in Cynthia, Todd and Jessica’s group. Jessica was the first out of the doorway once everybody was situated. “We take the east end and make our way down. Be ready for anything.”

The process of breaking down the doors and murdering the inhabitants commenced.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The entrance Brenner battered down revealed a wretched feeding ground. Enemies were absent from the corridor. The blood prints on the concrete were fresh, indicating they had fled recently. The place was a depository of gore. Plastic tubes by the hundreds dangled from on high. A chute dripped constantly into a five-foot-deep pit, the pit itself the size of an Olympic pool. Torsos, human appendages and organs floated in the bile mix of blood and death. The stench was ultraputrid.

The surface gargled and popped with air bubbles—heat or movement, he wasn’t sure. One thing he did know: he wasn’t alone. Understanding the imminent danger he was in, he hid in the corner, eyeing the surface of the death pool. More pockets of air burst on the surface; the top of a head glistened on the edge of the surface.

That has to be a vampire.

He went stiff at the loud banging of metal overhead. The chute channeling into the pit rattled. A load of death—a hermetic-tight square—was ejected down into the pool, plopping, displacing the contents of the fetid water. It overflowed at all sides. The blood tide carried to his standing position and soon returned to the pool.

It looks like they’ve found a way to give themselves seconds and thirds of meals…or are they’re feeding mouths we didn’t know about?

Heads poked up from the surface at regular intervals, but that was all that they revealed of themselves. Brenner looked up and down the main walkway located feet in front of him. They channeled into new corridors. Determined to understand what he’d stumbled upon, he crept past the pool to investigate.

He’d forgotten about the twelve-gauge strapped to his back. Claiming it, he aimed it in front of him, then chose to take a left in the corridor. The rooms at each end were nothing more than crudely built crawlspaces carved out of rock. Movements flitted in the dark—bodies crawling and shapes hiding.

They know I’m here.

Why aren’t they after me yet?

The walls trickled with gelatin, resembling the viscous substance surrounding the eggs of frogs. It glimmered and refracted random pockets of light from pocks in the ceiling. Ahead, the silvery goop paved a slippery walkway. He couldn’t pinpoint what it could be, so he avoided it.

The goop thinned out the farther he moved on, only concentrated in one section of the access. Soon, he walked on dry surface again. The next rooms—none of them with doors, just cubbyholes and hideaways—stowed zombies, vampires and werewolves who were all connected by IV tubes. Each creature was in a deep slumber. Blood circulated between each of them, swapped out constantly.

This is the rebellion.

He scuttled back through the goop section again and decided to navigate to the other end of the corridor. He crossed to the blood pit, and again, heads bobbed to the surface but then returned below.
This place is going to be crawling with them in no time. The fools upstairs don’t stand a chance. I’m not sure I stand a chance.

The opposite corridor, where he hadn’t searched yet, housed surviving human victims. Many were sublevel workers who’d gone missing. They were chained to the walls, naked and awaiting a fate worse than death. They didn’t look up to him when he passed, and he didn’t make an effort to save them. They were food, to be hunted, to be ravaged for pleasures. For now, they had to deal with their own problems.

Other crawlspaces and chambers contained the sleeping monsters, each swapping blood. There had to be hundreds.

This won’t be a fight.

This will be an annihilation.

If the island was destroyed, he could forget about staying protected. He’d be hunted by monsters and humans alike. Here, he was in charge, could enjoy as much blood as he wished. He didn’t have to worry about someone burning him on a pike or cutting his head off. The director of the PSA had assured him as a kid that would happen if he didn’t work on the island. He was born this way, an offshoot of the vampire, a genetic mutation—a rare abnormality. Here was the only place he’d be safe.

Brenner could only muster one plan, and that was to flood the basement with gasoline and burn them in their crypt. How he’d pull it off, he wasn’t certain. Any minute, the crowd of sleeping monsters could awaken, and that would be it for him. For everyone.

Peering in every direction for another way to go, he edged open a wooden door with the barrel of his twelve-gauge. Stairs carved out of concrete carried on for two flights down. The smell of sea salt filled the air. Water stirred, like slow waves hitting up against a wall. He couldn’t detect life below, so he flipped on his flashlight to ensure he was alone.

“Oh Christ,” he muttered. “This is really the end.”

The orange globe uncovered makeshift boats created from sheet metal, planks of wood or human bones. Stolen bedsheets and nylon tarps were used as sails. He went down another set of stairs and onto a concrete dock surrounded by water. The metal bars of a grate against the far wall blocked an exit, disguised by overhanging brush from the courtyard on the other side of the barrier.

They’ve been doing this under our feet, and we haven’t noticed.

We’ve been so careless.

Taking in the room as the wave of horror hit him again and again, he was drawn to a table with an old-fashioned radio wave receiver. The setup was two large boxes and a microphone and tuner in the middle, the devices submarines used to contact the surface in the early twentieth century. A contact log was open, thicker than two dictionaries. The data entries ranged from the early 1950s to just yesterday.

He read the latest log entry.

It simply read,
Escape at will.

He turned the pages back, desperate for more answers.
This is Layne Alexander reporting. Richard Cortez has been notified to keep an eye out for a rebellion. I’ve advised him to pick trustworthy allies to help him carry this task out to completion. This information will leak despite Cortez’s best efforts, and we want that. It will cause the workers to rebel themselves, and once they can’t be subdued, that’s the perfect time for you to attack. Don’t leave anybody alive. We’ll be ready for your arrival. Our ties will be severed once this occurs. You and your kind will be alone to fend for yourselves, as you’ve always wanted.

Another entry. Brenner skipped many pages backward, trying to locate a useful passage.
You’re asking for more bodies. This operation costs us billions a year. The funds aren’t always there. How can you expect us to double shipments of bodies and workers with only a week’s notice? Every year, you ask for more and more and never once have you cut back. If funding is ever slashed indefinitely, you should be the one to worry, not the United States.

He trembled, reading the passage again and again. Then Brenner flipped back even further in the past and paused on a single line:
Can you say for certain you and your fellow creatures are willing to give up their freedom to go to war with us?

He whispered the question to himself. “My God, how long has James Sorelli been in contact with the PSA?”

An unexpected response, “The whole time.”

He whipped around to catch James descending the stairs. He bled from a gash in his forehead, but the vampire was unaffected by the wound. His eyes were wild.

“But why are they talking to you?”

James cackled. “We could’ve broken free from those iron cages in Arizona without a problem, but we had better ideas. You could serve us, make us stronger, and we could build ourselves up in the meantime. Us afraid of society?” Through clenched teeth, “
Never
.”

The vampire confessed, “Humans can barely hunt quail and deer with the highest caliber of weapons. How do you think they can eliminate a threat like us? I used the government. They wanted peace, and I gave it to them—for a time. But I wasn’t going to get fat from the spoils. No; I’ve built a new army of monsters. It’s all in the blood. All of our maladies are from genetic defects. The blood is our common thread. We’ve fed, traded hemoglobin, and now we’re stronger, capable of feats we never fathomed. Mutations have occurred, of course, and they ultimately work to our advantage.

“And you, Brenner, are one of those examples. You were born with special abilities. Your muscle tissue and circulatory system can burst out of you and attack. It’s amazing, and I’ve known about you, Brenner, as long as both of us have been here. I’ve tried to replicate you, and I’ve failed, but I’ve come so close. All I need is to steal your blood, and we can bolster my den of creatures.”

“You’re not getting within two feet of me.” He cocked the twelve-gauge and pointed it at the beast. “The gun says no.”

“You can’t defeat us. Imagine how society began with only a few people. No cities, no large populations, no running water, no animals corralled and slaughtered in masses. Humanity wasn’t plagued with strange diseases as they are now. Now, we’re over three hundred million strong in the US alone. Cancer, AIDS, the black plague, cholera, hepatitis—all of these diseases was created by crowded cities, in the attempt to keep the masses fed and happy. The more you feed these diseases, the more abnormalities of flesh occur. We are the upside of your history of disease. We’re the product of years of immunity to the harshest of pathogens.” Giving him an encouraging face, one of a leader about to recruit a new member, James said, “You are one of us, not one of them. Join us. Share your blood. Let’s evolve together.”

Brenner absorbed the speech, knowing he could care less about the human race or the monsters. He wanted blood without having to watch his back, and if the monsters invaded America, every army in the world would join the battle. He wasn’t ready to die—not for them, not for anyone. The blood was worth living for, and the island was the way to succeed in his way of life.

The answer came easy to him.

“We’re all diseased, huh?” Brenner scoffed. “First, before I say anything, tell me why Layne Alexander is in contact with you?”

“The island has cost billions a year.” James sat on a ship of bones. He kept poking his fingers in and out of the sockets of an empty skull. “The economy’s really lagging, so what’s a country to do? There’s nothing like a good war to unite the country—hell, it’ll unite the world. For the first time in history, every third world country, every representative sitting at the United Nations, can embrace a common enemy. Maybe in the process there will be world peace…and maybe we’ll get a hold of more of that foreign oil in the process, that’s what they might be thinking. Who knows what conniving reasons they have for unleashing us upon the world? Maybe it’s a cruel form of population control.”

He was stunned by the flaw in James’s reasoning. “Can’t you see you’re sealing your demise? Sure, there’s more and more monsters born every day with our condition, but it’s not enough to prevent them from, let’s say, dropping a nuclear bad boy on us and calling it a day. We can’t win.”

James’s lips jerked, fighting against the possible truth. “I’ll die with blood on my hands. It’s my choice. I hate this fucking place. It’s a prison. Every time the tide comes in, I can smell blood from so far away. I want to stalk the night again. I love the chase. Here, everything’s much too easy. Blood falls from the ceiling from those goddamn tubes. It’s cold, mixed with human and animal, and worst of all, it’s not earned.”

“You have it so good, and you’re throwing it away so you can scare people. To hunt fat-asses and idiots.”

James pointed upward. “You couldn’t see the creatures, but they saw you. They’re nothing you’ve ever known. We’re simple, but they’re advanced. What side do you want to be on when the uprising begins?”

He had choices to make, but it sounded like the end result of each decision added up to the island being destroyed. “So you said you wanted to die with blood on your hands?”

“
Yeeesss
,” James hissed. “I want to bleed the human race dry. My monsters will awake any minute, or within the hour, I assure you. Once they awake, they’ll attack, so pick a side before it’s too late.”

Brenner swore the green line in each of the man’s eyes glowed brighter for a split second. “Well, I can deliver on one promise.”

Ba-boom!

James’s head erupted, every feature rendered into pink spray. Thrown back faceless and the back of his head oozing cranial guts, the corpse thudded onto the ground. Brenner lowered to his knees and stamped James’s hands into the mess. “
There
, you died with blood on your hands. Stupid asshole.”

Then his body reacted without warning. Circulatory snakes and cables shot out of his arms and chest and sucked up the blood from the floor, the hungry mouths appreciating every ounce until the vampire’s body was drained of its vital juices.