Vicious (28 page)

Her curious stare hardened at the mention of Marshall getting hurt. I truly was a monster for this. “Really. Who’s going to come after me? I can stay and be ready when you come out. Think about Marshall. Do you really think Bridgette and Jackson will look out for him the way you would? Go, Lulu.”

She glared at the mention of Bridgette and Jackson, and in one quick motion, she exited the van, ran to my side and threw open my door. Lulu reached out her hand to me and beckoned me to take it.

“Come on,” she urged.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re right. I don’t want to leave Marshall alone, but Anna told me to watch after you. So you’re coming with me.”

I beamed at her. This was exactly what I was hoping would happen. I took her hand and the tiny pixie practically dragged me towards the silent prison.

Chapter Thirty One

Anna

The outer walls had been taken silently, as had the few guards patrolling the cell blocks. I tried not to kill any of mine. I cut off their airways until they passed out. They would be bruised but alive when they awoke. There was one though that I regretted. The first guard stationed in the tower had had bad timing and leaned out of the window to flick away his cigarette before I had made it to him. He had spotted me scaling the wall, and it was all I could do to get to him before he hit the alarm button. I’d lost control and twisted his neck to the point of breaking in my hurried frenzy. His neck had snapped, and I’d instantly felt intense sorrow and regret as I watched his limp body fall lifeless to the floor. I tried to comfort myself by thinking he probably had tortured and killed countless prisoners and who knows how many of my kind, but it didn’t help much. I kept moving because I had to keep moving.

My original theories about a well-crafted trap quickly began to dissolve the farther and farther we moved into the prison. The few guards we encountered and silenced seemed unknowing and inept. No alarms sounded, and we were able to maneuver through the halls with relative ease. I began to think perhaps this was not a prison that housed vampires, but when I caught a glance from an inmate staring out at me through his cell and saw him recoil in horror at the sight of my eyes, I knew there must be vampires here. I pressed my finger to my lips to make a silent shushing gesture, and he obeyed immediately. The rest of the inmates stayed completely quiet. Grown men cowered, hoping we would be like a rolling storm that silently passed them by. We did them the courtesy of just that.

We came upon a set of large doors that reeked of blood and death. It’s a smell most humans don’t detect unless they are in the room with it, but all of us perked up and grew rigid at the scent as soon as we approached the doors. We pushed through the doors and down a dark hallway lit with a sickeningly green light along the walls.

We came upon a seemingly ordinary door that wasn’t locked. It was obvious nothing too dangerous was behind it since it seemed to be a normal door fitted with a standard lock. Just before Lea reached for the door, we were suddenly met with the sound of footsteps running down the hallway towards us. One set was small and light, and the other set clomped hard with loud thuds on the cement floor. We all tensed with our fangs bared as Lulu and Grant rounded the corner.

Everyone groaned and relaxed the tension out of their stances except me. I was furious and looked at the two of them appalled.

“What are you doing here? I told you to wait at the van,” I whispered angrily at them.

Grant walked up to me with little notice of my mood and shrugged. I fumed at him with the fury of a hurricane.

“Lulu decided to bring me,” he replied with a smirk.

“Have you both lost your minds?”

I looked at Lulu who had sidled up to Marshall and gripped his hand. When I glared at her, she only stared back and smiled that blank grin she had when she didn’t have anything to say for herself. Grant kissed my cheek. I sighed.

“Very well,” I said grimly. “I can’t do anything about it now. Stay close and don’t get killed, Grant.”

He smiled broadly at me, and I knew he was to blame for this somehow. We would have to discuss it later if there was a later for us.

“Anna,” interrupted Lea. “If you and your pet
are done, we need to proceed before anyone sees us.”

She kicked open the door in a totally unnecessary gesture of her frustration, and we all entered the room behind her. It was a lab. One very much like the one we had seen at our prison. When we hadn’t found one at the prison in Texas, I had assumed they had learned their lesson from us, but that wasn’t true. That particular prison had been sans lab, but this one wasn’t.

We looked around with the utmost caution but found no information. All of the files had been destroyed. There were smoldering piles of ash that signified where file folders had recently been burned in trash cans. There were even a few desktop computers that had been obviously smashed quickly and were beyond repair. They had known we were coming, but how?

It wasn’t long before we found a few televisions with a live feed to the outside of the prison. They would have seen us coming. However, instead of alerting the guards when they saw our approach, they had quickly burned and smashed everything before they made their secret escape, using the guards as a distraction for us while they did so. I snorted at the revelation and at their cowardice.

It wasn’t until I caught the scent of another living thing that I tensed and my senses pricked. I saw Lea stand at attention too. With a comprehensive glance at one another, we followed the scent to a little room with a single hospital bed in it. Lying on that bed was a woman. No, she wasn’t really a woman. She was a vampire.

We stood on each side of her bed and stared at her unconscious face. She was one of us, and she was near death. Tubes were coming out of her nose and mouth, and she seemed to be hooked up to a number of beeping machines. I looked harder at her face, and I suddenly came to the sickening realization that this woman was Rose.

Our Rose had been lost to us during the turmoil of our frantic escape, and we’d never known what had become of her. The Rose we knew had round cheeks that flushed when she was excited against her fair skin and a long mane of auburn hair. She hadn’t remembered her name at all, so we’d named her Rose. However, this creature looked so pallid and thin, like a skeletal version of our Rose. Her bones protruded through her skin and her lips were shriveled back from her pointy teeth. Skin shrank and clung to the hollows of her cheeks and temples. I envisioned standing before the corpse of Rose in a casket at a funeral for her.

“We know her,” I breathed as I stared into her face. “It’s Rose.” I looked around to see the others crowding the bed as well.

“I always wondered what had happened to her,” said Lea.

Lulu squeaked a little with her hand raised over her mouth in shock. The realization that Rose had been alive all of this time and suffering at the hands of the scientists began to seep into the very air of the room and its inhabitants.

“Lulu,” I started, “What’s wrong with her?”

She examined the machines and the auburn-headed zombie of Rose on the table. “She looks like she’s in a coma. I didn’t know our kind could be put in a coma, but it doesn’t look like they ever intended for her to wake from it. Her brain is probably nothing but baby-food mush in there by now. Pinky bubblegum mush.”

“Jesus, Lulu. It’s not the time for your freak show,” retorted Lea.

“How long has she been this way?”

“Can’t tell. I doubt anyone could have beaten a vampire into a coma that lasted decades, but you never know. They might have given her some sort of drug to make her this way.”

“But why would they keep her like this?”

“For the blood. Look,” Lulu said as she pointed to one tube that started in an incision in her arm and stretched to some IV bags full of red blood. “They kept her to continue to get her blood to make more of us.”

I felt sick, and everyone looked disgusted too. Grant turned green, and for a moment, I was afraid he would vomit right there. He composed himself with a hard swallow.

“What do we do with her?” asked Marshall as he stared down at the comatose vampire. “We can’t leave her here for them to recover, and we have to leave soon. Who knows when the reinforcements the scientists must have called will get here.”

Lea moved first, and she began unplugging wires and cables that attached Rose to the machines around her. She pulled out the tube in her arm that provided the blood as the machines beeped and screeched in protest. Then she destroyed the bags of blood by throwing them full force against the far wall, which made them burst and splatter blood everywhere.

Rose’s body didn’t even move. The only hint the vampire was dead was when her head slouched slightly to her right. The heart monitor, the one machine Lea hadn’t unplugged, made a lingering beep of a flat line. We respected a long moment of silence for our friend Rose. She looked like anything dead did, quiet and lifeless.

“I suppose this means we can die,” remarked Gabriel.

“Did you think we couldn’t?” asked Cat.

“I didn’t know.”

“None of us did for sure,” said Lulu.

“So this is what a dead vampire looks like. We killed her,” said Marshall.

“I believe she would rather die peacefully this way than be milked for the rest of her long life like some comatose dairy cow,” Lea said angrily.

I had to say that I agreed.

Chapter Thirty Two

Grant

We stood before a new door now. It was the only other door in that terrible hallway, so it had to be the
door. After what we had seen in the last room, I was terrified to open up this one. Memories began flooding my horror-stricken brain of when we had opened the werewolf door in Texas. Of course, I had had a silver-tipped spear to arm myself with then, and now I had nothing. I really had no one but myself to blame for that fact, but I lamented it all the same. I inched closer to Anna as her eyes inked over in preparation of what was behind this large metal door. Cat and Gabriel were working on the best way to pry it off with the least amount of noise.

I leaned over to Anna.

“You don’t smell dog in this one, do you?”

“No,” she answered seriously. “I have a feeling it may be much worse though. Stay close behind me.”

That did nothing for my nerves, and I held my breath as Cat and Gabriel opted to break the large lock and fling open the door in two quick movements. We all stared into the dark room, anticipating what might jump out at us.

Four small figures stumbled out of the darkness and stared up at us with the wide-eyed expression of children. Their clothes were tattered and covered with blood and filth, and their skin was dirtied with the same. When I got a clearer look, I saw they actually were children. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I was watching four children ranging from ages seven to ten. They stumbled out of the darkness while shielding their eyes to the newly introduced light. What were children doing here?

A collective gasp overtook us all. We were all stunned, and thus, didn’t notice the strange look to their eyes until it was too late. As soon as their eyes had adjusted, they inked over black and they leaped away in all directions with their fangs bared. Their speed was amazing, like a vampire’s.

They were vampire children. The scientists had made vampires out of children. Had they hoped they might be easier to tame if they were younger? Maybe they had wanted to create a vampire with all of the expectant needs of a child? Either way, I thought it a pretty smart move that those scientists had left so quickly. After seeing this, I would have torn them limb from limb myself.

Small, menacing growls and snarls echoed through the hallway as the tiny demons moved and attacked us so quickly it was hard for even the vampires to see them. We watched them dance and jump to and fro, not knowing what we would do if they ever lighted on anything.

One tried to go for Bridgette’s calf, and Bridgette caught the little boy by the neck. He hissed and growled and spat at her with an intense need that simply wouldn’t wane. She held him without much difficulty, but her horror was palpable.

“What do I do with it?” she asked over the din of leaping snarls.

The vampires looked at the snapping child, and a sad understanding fell over their faces. Anna looked at Lea, and Lea nodded solemnly. They knew the look in the child’s insistent eyes. They knew it to be the look of pure rage and need for blood. There was no way to control these monsters. They would never grow beyond a child’s urgent need. They were stunted in childhood for as long as they lived. Their blind hunger for death and blood would never wane or mature.

Bridgette nodded back at them and promptly snapped the child’s neck in a way that made the head dangled away from the small shoulders. We all winced as the child vampire’s body fell limply to the floor. At the sight of their comrade’s death, the other three attacked the nearest adult vampire only to be killed just as quickly. A somber mood settled over us, and I sincerely wished I had stayed in the van instead of convincing Lulu to bring me to this place. I wanted to weep.

Suddenly, another child bolted from the darkness and headed straight for Anna. Anna barely had time to tense her muscles before the boy was on her in a flash of black cloth and bare flesh. However, instead of attacking Anna, the boy hugged her torso and began weeping audibly.