10

I SAID I WAS READY TO DIE. I DIDN’T SAY I WAS READY TO DIE QUIETLY.

Stay alive and get out of here,” I told the sprite. “I still need you to be a witness to Emil’s oath.”

I opened the door to the cell at normal speed and shot the pair of visible guards in the back of their heads while the sprite flitted around their eyes. They were wearing bulletproof helmets along with their Kevlar field suits, but it was still an AN-94. And it was still their heads.

Maybe they woke up with headaches later, or maybe they died, or maybe they had spasms or stutters or twitches or more serious mental impairments for the rest of their lives. Maybe they would have aneurysms twenty years later. Head trauma is like a box of blood clots. You never know what you’re going to get.

A knight on my left tossed a flash-bang grenade my way, timed to go off directly in front of the door, but I used the AN-94’s butt to smack the grenade back with faster-than-human reflexes. I bit down on a pressure switch inside my helmet that activated foam inserts over my ears, and I still heard the bang and saw too much bright light through my closed eyelids.

Bullets glanced off my ribs at an angle as I darted back into the doorway while a knight on my right fired for my center mass. Partially blind, I fired a concussion grenade in a bank shot off the far wall. I was assuming that the guard was in a parallel position to the one on my left, and that must have been close to the truth. He was torn off of his feet like a small child being yanked by one extremely angry mother.

The remaining guard on the left tried to lunge across to the far wall, firing his own AN-94 into the doorway. Unfortunately for him, I was no longer in the doorway, a fact that he couldn’t see or hear because he had been blinded by the flash-bang grenade, and his automatic fire was deafening.

I couldn’t really see or hear him very well either, and we almost passed each other in the hallway with guns blazing. We both started to swivel, but I was faster and actually felt our rifle barrels smash into each other like foils crossing in a fencing match. I fired a two-round burst into his chest.

He went down, and I drove my rifle butt into something that made him stop moving.

I didn’t think the bullets had broken any of my ribs, though a few were sore as hell. My vision was clearing but spotty and my ears were ringing, and the floor was shaking again, big-time. A large group was coming down the hall on my right, out of sight but approaching the corner. I caromed another concussion grenade off the far wall and around the corner just to make them slow down.

It worked.

I’ve worked a lot of construction jobs while roaming around looking for work that pays under the table, and corners usually have two big, solid blocks forming an angle that anchors the drywall. That part of the corner facing me would be bulletproof. But basement walls often have furring strips behind the plaster in front of the corners, vertical supports evenly spaced apart that leave a lot of interior space behind the plaster.

So I charged the wall next to me, firing my rifle into it to identify the open spaces. I smashed through the plaster beside a furring strip and found myself tearing the plastic tray off of a Xerox machine while charging through a small storeroom of some kind. Bizarrely, the room held ordinary office supplies. Their very normalcy seemed out of place, somehow.

I kept charging the far wall, headed toward a little space beside a shelf rack. This time, I bounced painfully off a furring strip and erupted through drywall on the other side. Suddenly, I was in the middle of a pack of knights in a hallway. The lights were flickering, the sprite’s work, and I shoulder-charged one of the knights off of his feet and started swinging the butt of my rifle at helmets superhumanly fast while they couldn’t fire without the risk of hitting each other. Those few seconds were a disorienting nightmare, but when they were over, I was the only one standing. My left arm was throbbing where it had caught a rifle butt, and the top of my right shoulder was sore where a bullet had grazed the top of it, but there were four knights on the floor.

There was a narrow stairwell in front of me, and I went up it fast, using a crack of light under the door as a guide. As I neared the top, I jumped up, pushed one foot off the stairway railing, and propelled myself into the air above the door. Spreading my legs out, I braced the flats of my feet against the wall so that I was suspended above the door when automatic fire tore through it from the other side. What was left of the door was flung open and two rifle barrels and a shaft of light burst through.

There were a lot of things wrong with that picture. The arms holding the rifles weren’t in armor, for one, and the weapons were different. They were rifles I’d never seen before, LWRC PSD rifles that fired a heavier armor-piercing round, actually, although I didn’t find that out until later. I was already dropping before I realized that these men weren’t knights. They smelled like wolves.

I didn’t have time to ask questions, because even if these men didn’t have knight training, they had some training, and jacked-up reflexes to boot. I fell half between them and half on them, and the next thing I knew, my own weapon was flying out of my hand and a stronger-than-normal elbow was shoving me backward through the air. I grabbed out with my suddenly free hands and seized the straps of their Kevlar vests, pulling them with me.

It probably would have looked cartoonlike to an observer: three men rolling over and ricocheting off of each other in a superhumanly fast frenzy of lashing limbs and dropping weapons and curses as they tumbled down a stairway.

I managed to drive the stiff side of a hand into a throat and crushed a larynx, then tumbled another man over me with my knees while we were rolling. For a moment, he managed to slow our roll with his hands on the stairwell walls, and I grabbed a Taurus 44 Tracker out of his side holster and shot him in the face. He went limp, and as soon as he stopped bracing us, I began sliding painfully down the stairs on my back, holding him on top of me and using his body as extra protection down the last few stairs.

The Taurus wasn’t firing silver bullets. He would be fine after he woke up in an hour or so with the mother of all headaches.

The other one had stopped tumbling a few stairs above us and was sitting upright and clutching his throat, trying to force breath down into his lungs and making frantic pecking motions with his chin. I shot him in the head too, and then shot the new guy who was standing at the top of the stairs above him with another PSD rifle. I knocked him out of the doorway with several rounds into his torso.

“WAIT!!!” a voice screamed from the top of the stairs. “JUST WAIT A MINUTE, DAMMIT! YOU’RE HIM, AREN’T YOU?!? YOU’RE JOHN CHARMING.”

“What if I am?” I said cautiously. I didn’t raise my voice. Why bother? These were werewolves.

“I THINK I’LL GO HOME AND CHOP MY DICK OFF!” the voice yelled.

This was a safe phrase that Sig and I had worked out before going down into a vampire lair. I had taken it from an old George Carlin routine where the comedian was trying to come up with a combination of words that had never before been spoken in the English language.

The phrase was a way for Sig and me to let the other know that everything was okay and that we weren’t being held under any kind of duress.

Whoever these guys were, Sig was either with them or had sent them.

That’s how I met the wolf clan.