By James R. Tuck
He stank of other men's blood.
It coated his arms and hands, soaking into his undershirt and gluing it to his body. It rode his skin in a grimy wetness pooled along the ridge of his belt, not soaking into the polyester weave. His boots sloshed with it as he crept along, short crab steps hugging the tunnel wall.
A shape moved up ahead, pushing through the darkness that hung between bare bulbs strung with wire along the ceiling. He crouched in a pool of similar darkness, pressing himself against the smooth concrete wall that held back crushing tons of dirt and rock. His breath came in long soft sweeps of inhalation and exhalation, silent and nearly still. No movement to betray his presence.
A sentry broke through the pool of light just past him. He had only three steps to measure the man, to assess him. Average height for the population and on the lower edge of the average weight, his face sank in around the eye sockets, cheekbones hanging like cliffs over a long fall of dark beard. He moved with an undisciplined amble, knees bowed, toes swinging left then right as he walked. His hands cradled a battered AK-47 slung across his chest on an old guitar strap, a flaming skull grinned from the embroidery.
Probably taken from a captured civilian.
The sentry's stride didn't break, didn't falter, he marched face first into the shadow, eyes hooded by the keffiyeh that wrapped his head. One step the sentry was in the darkness. Two steps the sentry was beside him.
He rose, pushing with his knees and pivoting, swinging his long arms up and around. Between his hands looped a stretch of stainless steel wire barely thicker than a strand of hair. It passed over the sentry's head, a whisper unheard in the dark, and descended in front of the man's face. It stopped when it landed on the collarbone. He kept pivoting, turning and dropping back into a crouch. The wire cinched, biting deep. The sentry jolted to a stop and fell back, dragged down by the line of cutting pressure across his Adam’s apple. The sentry's weight fell across his back. He pulled hard on the garrote as the sentry thrashed, trying to stand up, to get away from the lacerating pain that held him pinned to his killer's back. Each jerk and spasm sawed the thin wire deeper and deeper still. His hands dropped a quarter inch as the wire cut through whiskers and then skin then meat then vein.
It snagged, stopping against cartilage. In his ear came the hush and gurgle of air rushing out, the sentry trying desperately to scream. Hot wet ran under his collar as the carotid severed, wicking into the cotton fibers of his shirt. The sentry's keffiyeh unfurled, draping over his face. The black-and-white cloth swayed gently as the convulsions slowed.
When the man on his back stilled, he counted to thirty, then leaned toward the wall, letting the dead weight slide sideways off his shoulder. The AK-47 clattered against concrete, muffled by the corpse it was strapped to.
He froze, eyes darting left and right.
No movement came from either end of the tunnel.
He slowly released the breath he'd been holding.
He unwound the garrote. It stuck in the fibrous cartilage and he had to yank to free it. A micro-spray of fluid came out with it, spattering his chin and across his upper lip. He swiped his sleeve across it but the warm penny stink of blood became the only thing he could smell. Deep in his brain his conscience kicked and revulsion rolled over him. It clotted his lungs, smothering him.
He hated this. Hated the smell of blood. Hated the feel of a life snuffing out at his hands. Hated killing. Hated how easy it was for him.
Hated himself.
He stripped the dead man of ammunition and moved on down the tunnel.
He could live with the iron tang of someone else's hemoglobin shoved into his nostrils but he couldn't die before he saved her.
*
“I hate these tunnels.”
He didn't say anything, just kept working, carefully placing the gray putty in the proper crevices, gently pressing it into the proper shape.
“They piss me off, the audacity of them. To dig into our country, using materials designated to build homes, just to kill our people.” She sighed, adjusting the rifle in her hands. “It's inhuman.” She stood just past him, but behind the floodlight, facing down the tunnel it painted nearly white with illumination. She didn't watch him work. That wasn't what she was there for.
She was there to provide a safe working environment.
“They should let you blow this whole system.” She glanced back at him. “Just bring the whole thing crashing down.”
He stepped away from the charge before speaking. “I'd need an escort the whole way. Might as well sweep them clean on foot.”
“Hush. There have been rumblings from above.”
He tried to keep his voice as steady as his hands but it jerked up on the last word like a fish on a hook. “Not your squad!”
She sauntered over, hips swaying a bit, just enough to distract him. “When they comb these rat tunnels, it'll be all boots on the ground, no exceptions.” She leaned and kissed him on the cheek.
His mouth stayed in a hard line, jaw clenched. Even as a contractor he'd heard the noise about a mission to raid the entirety of the tunnel system and flush out the terrorists who used it to spread fear and chaos in their mad hatred of his people.
She's almost done. Just a few more months.
Her hand slapped his jaw, harder than lightly, sharp enough to get his attention.
“Don't look like that, Neshama. I see your worry.” Her voice was as firm as her hand.
“I only worry about you.” He pointed into the darkness. “These are a deathtrap. Too many twists. Too many places for enemies to hide.”
“Saul…”
The sound of boots on concrete came down the tunnel behind them. She stepped away, turning to face the depth of the tunnel. He moved to his satchel and began placing his tools into it.
Even married, fraternizing while on duty was a serious offense.
With that thought he regretted not grabbing her, pulling her tight, and kissing the hell out of her.
An IDF soldier stepped into the light. His uniform fit his body but still looked loose, as if he just didn't quite fill it. Saul knew him. Yakov. He lived below them in an apartment with two other soldiers who began their service the same time he had. All three of them had turned eighteen within a week of each other.
One month ago.
Yakov watched the two of them for a moment. Saul stood, closing his satchel.
Yakov's eyes trailed over the work area, picking out the brownish-red lumps of Semtex stuck to the smooth concrete walls like clots of old blood. He swallowed, his Adam's apple dropping into his collar and bobbing back up under his sharp chin. “Are you almost done?”
“I am done.”
Yakov nodded and moved to the floodlight. “Let's go then.” His hand closed on the handle of the floodlight. Saul moved to grab the other one. They lifted at the same time, tilting the floodlight over its axle. The tunnel grew dim as the light shone mostly on the floor. “Watch our backs, Eliora. These tunnels creep me out.”
Eliora nodded, lifting her rifle. “These tunnels creep us all out.”
As a team they began moving back to the entrance.
*
He pulled back his sleeve, checking the display. The yellow dot had not moved. His mouth went sour with fear at what that could mean.
She's still alive, still alive, still alive. I will it, so must it be done. God of my fathers, You keep her alive.
He turned his wrist and checked the compass strapped there. He had to wipe blood off the glass. The pointer wobbled over the E. He was still going in the right direction.
Earlier he'd used a small, shaped charge to push aside rubble he'd created months ago, directing the concussive force like a surgeon to open up enough room for him to crawl into the hell tunnels. It was the closest place he'd known of to where Eliora's GPS tag transmitted its signal. He'd run nine kilometers of pitch dark tunnels, using only a red-lensed flashlight to see by, before he'd found lights, and three more before he'd killed his first terrorist of the night.
Nine corpses later and he was close. The GPS indicated, and the last four sentries he'd killed had been patrolling instead of stationary. More action taken, the more likely he was on the right track. The tunnel he moved through struck deep in the heart of Israel, dozens of kilometers from the Gaza border. It remained fairly straight, he'd been consistently moving east since meeting the occupied tunnel, and also had few side tunnels.
He eased toward a juncture, watching the area ahead. His own blood stuttered through his veins, pushed by his hammering heart as each step he waited for the click of a mine trigger. An open area lay ahead, the end of his tunnel covered in a grid of rebar. Light spilled out onto the tunnel walls, long oblongs of color sliding between the iron bars in a pattern over and over and over. He forced his eyes past it. Looking at it for more than a few seconds made his stomach clench and his vision get slippery.
He dropped to his hands and fast-crawled to the edge of the wall. He didn't feel any sentries nearby, relying on the combination of his senses to report to him and the instant assessment hard-learned in training and combat.
Noise thrummed the air around him. Voices speaking Arabic over the ebb and flow of some white noise he couldn't identify.
He looked past the rebar that sealed the tunnel.
The room lay in darkness broken by patches of light.
In one circle, a dozen men hovered around an area that lay in a concrete box nearly the size of a large house. Most of them looked the same from where he crouched, the same loose-fitting clothes, the same keffiyehs, all bearded, all armed. Textbook terrorists. Like brothers in the same family.
Two stood out. One in an olive drab uniform so unremarkable it could have come from a dozen nationalities and one in a plain black t-shirt over the same olive-drab pants. They were on the far left of the room, surrounded by most of the terrorists who watched as they did something to a man strapped on the table in front of them. He was an IDF soldier, still in uniform but his shirt opened and hanging loose off the sides of the table. He screamed and jerked, cursing as the man in the black t-shirt plunged a syringe into his arm.
Saul looked away, dragging his eyes from the fascination of the scene, needing to assess the rest of the situation.
At the far end of the room was a large tunnel also bathed in light, a heavy-duty diesel truck with a long shallow bed parked at the entrance. He'd seen one like it before, hauling American soldiers in Afghanistan. On the back of the truck sat a wooden crate strapped in place between the bench seats that ran along each side of the back. A bar had been affixed down each side, about head level when seated. Short chains hung from it. The tunnel pointed east.
Toward Jerusalem.
In the center of the room was a long cage made of iron bars and plywood. The end of it hung out over a deeper pit.
Lights flashed and swirled in colors from inside the pit, the source of the dancing shapes on the wall behind him. His mind flung back to the third night of his honeymoon, when Eliora had drug him into a Paris nightclub. He'd hated the noise of it, unable to hear anything but a wall of sonic noise, hated the epileptic strobes that ruined his vision, hated the press of people that made it impossible to see any danger that might lurk in such an environment. He ignored the klaxon of panic in his chest as long as he could, though it grew with each passing minute. He tried to distract himself with his new bride's smile and her moving body. He held his control as long as he could before dragging her out and into a cab with the pretense that he couldn't wait to have her in the hotel again.
He'd never told her the truth.
Never confessed the depth of his involvement with S-13 and how those years affected him.
White light flooded into the cage from floodlights strapped across the top, making it easy to see that most of its occupants were soldiers, their uniforms marking them. A handful of civilians huddled in the cage, limbs thin and clothes tattered. They were not taken with the soldiers, their state of deterioration indicated they'd been down here a long time.
He looked for Eliora, straining his eyes to see her, to pick her out. There were five women in the cage. He ruled two out immediately. One was shorter and heavier than Eliora, her body built from exaggerated curves instead of Eliora's athletic sleekness. The other sat against the bars, long blonde hair hanging over her face.
Eyes roving, he dismissed two others being held by male counterparts. Eliora would never seek shelter in anyone's arms in a situation like this. Warmth infused his heart at the thought of her stubborn pride, a streak of it a mile wide in her. His woman was a valkyrie, an amazon, she'd be more likely to hold someone than to ever be held.
He found her.
Standing in a corner with a group of men, head bowed as they whispered, mouths closing shut when one of their captors would pass close to the cage.
She was planning an escape.
In the middle of a well-lit cage surrounded by armed guards.
It was suicide.
He turned and examined the grate in front of him. It was made of rebar, the finger-thick steel bars welded into a grid and bolted to the concrete. The bars were painted black, the overspray patterning the walls and floor. He felt the hexagonal heads of the bolts, testing them. They were all tight. He dug in his tool satchel by feel, fingers searching the sides of it, skimming over enough Semtex to drop a full kilometer of tunnels to touch the tools strapped there with elastic loops. His S-13 training in demolitions taught him to know exactly where his tools were at all times. In seconds he pulled out a ratchet with an adjustable socket. Checking to make sure no one had looked his way, he settled the tool over a bolt head and began to work.
*
“Hello?”
The light scrape of breath came through the phone. He waited.
Seconds passed.
A minute.
He wanted to speak, to ask “Who is this?” but he held his tongue behind a clenched jaw.
Finally.
“Saul?” The connection was clear but the voice echoing and thin, the phone not held close to the mouth.
He still recognized it as Yakov. “What's wrong?”
“It started.”
“What's wrong?”
“We hit the tunnels…” Noise came over the phone, a jumble of voices and the syncopated rhythm of booted feet. He held the phone tight, pressing it against his cheek. His heartbeat pulsed in his temples. A scream of frustration clawed at the back of his throat, scrabbling to get out, to rip into the phone and demand to know what was going on.
“Saul?”
“Talk, Yakov.”
“They knew we were coming. We lost a lot of people.”
He couldn't breathe.
“Eliora… she didn't make it out.”
His eyes squeezed shut. His stomach lurched. His chest felt like it was folding in on itself.
Yakov's voice rose, words flying across the phone line. “She's not dead. They took her, dragged her off. They were trying to capture as many of us as they were trying to kill. Command pulled us out and are considering the losses as KIA but she wasn't dead when I saw her. They aren't letting us go back into the tunnels.”
He swallowed, forcing his mouth to work. “They're leaving her to die?” He shut his mind to the images of what happened to prisoners of terrorists. He couldn't think those thoughts.
“Eliora told me about you, about S-13… I have her GPS code.”
Soldiers were given jelly bean–sized ceramic GPS transmitters to swallow before infiltration missions. They stayed in the system for up to four days before passing through, allowing them to be recovered or rescued. He'd swallowed dozens of them before he walked away from S-13. Before he found peace with Eliora.
Hope blossomed in his chest, his heart lurching back into action.
With the code, he could locate her. With the code, he could find her.
“Give it to me.”
*
He moved to the edge of the shadow by the cage, crouching by a table covered in a bloody white sheet and a handful of tools. The man on the far side of the room had stopped screaming, his noise replaced by the voices of the terrorists questioning the two men and their answers in butchered Arabic. The sound of their consonants made him think they were Russian, a country with deep ties to terrorists.
The two cage guards were on the other side talking, as far away from his position as they were going to get.
Eliora stood with her back to him, watching them.
"Neshama." He hissed, keeping his voice as low as possible.
Eliora stiffened. Casually, she turned and leaned against the bars of the cage. He watched her eye cut toward him and widen. A bruise darkened her jaw, spilling up toward her cheekbone, and the skin across the bridge of her nose had split from some impact. He swallowed a lump of cold rage at the sight.
She spoke, matching his volume, moving her mouth as little as possible. "You have to go. They will capture you."
"I'm going to get you out. Be ready."
"This is more than you think."
"Be ready."
She nodded, the barest increment, knowing him well enough to stop arguing. A black collar had been clamped around her throat. It had a square battery pack and radio receiver surrounded by silver spots he recognized as shock points.
These animals.
Eliora spoke. "Don't get killed over me."
"Neshama."
"Oh, Neshama,” her lip trembled, the tiniest hint of her worry “Be careful. Love."
"Love."
He eased back, working carefully around into the shadow. He waited, watching the room as best he could but his eyes kept going back to Eliora.
He would get her out of that cage.
His hand slipped under the AK-47 strapped across his back. He'd taken it from the last sentry he'd killed. It stuck to his shirt, the blood on it and on the rifle itself dried to a crust. He broke it free with a shrug and moved it back to reach the small object tucked in his belt beside his kidney.
He drew out the tiny .22 loaded with subsonic ammunition and held it by his leg.
One of the cage guards began walking around the cage toward him. He didn't move, didn't adjust his position. Motion drew the eye quicker than anything else. He trusted his cover and waited.
The guard drew close enough that Saul could see his face. His skin was dark, someone who'd spent a long time in the sun, and his beard touched by gray. The left side of his face pulled down with a palsy, probably from childhood malnutrition. Saul recognized the carved look of someone raised on too little to eat.
He felt no compassion at the recognition.
The man walked past him. He rose and in two steps closed the distance, sliding his arm under the guard's armpit. His fingers snarled in the matted beard and yanked down as he pressed the barrel of the .22 into the folds of the guard's keffiyeh. Two quick squeezes on the short trigger spat two bullets into the man's skull. The cloth ate the POP! POP! of the projectiles and only he heard the wet melon thump of them rattling around the inside of the guard's skull, turning his brain into so much mush.
He looked around.
None of the terrorists reacted, all of them occupied elsewhere.
Using the beard and arm, he dragged the dead man back into the shadow and shoved him under a table. He pulled off the man's keffiyeh. Only two spots of blood stained the cloth where it pressed tight to the dead man's skull, the rest of it trapped inside the skull. One eye bulged, pushed forward by one of the bullets in its ricochet. The first time he'd used a .22 he hadn't pulled the man's head down and one of the bullets had gone out the eye socket, making a mess.
He'd adjusted his technique since then.
He wrapped his head with the dead man's headdress, ignoring the burnt scent of scalp oil, and stood, walking through the gloom as if he were the guard. Eliora watched him, her face set in hard lines. Three IDF soldiers had joined her, leaning beside her, helping to block him from the other guard's sight. They were all in similar shape as her, roughed up, one of them cradled his arm in a sling made from his uniform shirt. Stepping quickly, he passed the dead man's rifle through the bars and kept walking, trusting his wife to keep it from sight until it was time to use it.
He walked around the cage at the same amble the guard he killed had been moving. His eyes moved around, taking stock of the situation, formulating a plan. The other guard wouldn't be fooled by him for more than a moment. He needed to put the man down quickly but odds were it wouldn't be quietly. He would have only seconds to spring the cage before having to deal with the terrorists on the far side of the room.
He passed by the truck. If he could free Eliora and the IDF soldiers, they could use the truck to get clear of the terrorists. He didn't know what lay down that tunnel or how they would get out of the other end but it was better than staying. Here was only death and torture at the hands of his country's enemies.
One of the civilians in the cage turned as he passed by. The man's eyes grew big at the sight of Saul's black fatigues and the weapons strapped to him. His mouth opened.
Saul tensed.
Before the man could make a sound one of the IDF soldiers was beside him, grabbing his arm and barking something in a harsh whisper. The civilian nodded and turned his back on Saul.
He could rely on the soldiers to help.
It might be enough.
If he could just drop the guard.
He rounded the corner, walking swiftly. He still had the .22 in his hand, held by his side.
The other guard was twenty feet away, looking down at the lights in the pit. His mouth hung open.
Saul picked up his pace, moving quicker, watching the other terrorists gathered around the table across the pit. They were silhouettes and shapes through the haze of the light noise bouncing out of the hole.
He offered up a quick prayer, the words foreign in his mind, any real sense of religion long dead from his days in S-13. He prayed that the guard stayed mesmerized. Prayed that he would be able to pull this off.
I can die, just let me get her out.
Five feet away he lifted the gun and lengthened his stride.
The barrel touched the guard's back and he pulled the trigger three times, shoving forward to muffle the shots against the man’s body. The little gun emptied with three quick snaps, no louder than biting into fresh celery. The guard jerked forward, spine bowing as the tiny bullets punched into his lungs, pulping their way through. One of them hit a rib, ricocheting back and nicking the pericardium sac. He took two steps and tumbled headfirst onto the edge of the pit.
Noise exploded, hissing and howling, filling the air.
Saul stepped over and looked down.
Inside the hole were people but they weren't human.
Twenty faces stared up at him with mouths open. Men, women, and children. Their skin had drained its color to a bright, shiny jaundice and constricted to their bones. They clawed the air, straining for the dead soldier that lay out of their reach. Tears of frustration painted gaunt faces, running from eyes so bloodshot they looked like eggs boiled in paint. He'd never seen such animal fury contained in one place, a berserker rage that roiled and rushed out in their screams, driven in pace with the lights flashing along the edge of the pit.
Eliora's voice cut through his mesmerization.
“They're vampires!”
*
“This is my cell, son, not a secure line.”
“I know, sir. I don't have time.”
The sigh cut across the phone like paper rubbed over the mouthpiece. “One minute then, all hell's breaking loose.”
He read off the GPS coordinates. “I need to know what cells might be working there.”
“What for?”
“You said one minute.” He pushed every bit of need into the next word. “Please.”
“Hamas, Al Ghurabaa, possibly the White Flame.”
He let the information sink in, mind turning.
The voice spoke. “We just had something go pear-shaped near there, son.”
“I know.”
“Best stay out of the way of the clean-up.”
He swiped the button, ending the call.
*
Bullets ripped across the room.
“Move back!” Saul yelled. “Get away from this door!”
He dug in his satchel as his mind rolled through what he'd just seen. Vampires. He'd heard of vampires, the whole world had heard of vampires, but Israel had managed to curtail any major outbreak with stringent control.
Shit. Vampires.
His fingers pinched off small chunks of Semtex, pressing it against the hinges of the cage door. It was sloppy, most of the force would blow back, but he had no time for precision. Eliora shouldered the others back, using her elbows to move soldiers and civilians alike. One woman, the soldier with curves, spun around as a bullet punched her in the shoulder. Blood arced into the air, spattering the people beside her as she slammed into the ground and screamed. Eliora raised the gun Saul had given her and fired at the terrorists through the bars in quick three-round bursts, keeping her cool, picking her targets.
Plastic explosive in place, Saul pushed a pop-up timer into the middle lump, trusting that the force of it going off would be enough to detonate the other two patches of explosive on the other two hinges. He pressed the red button until it clicked, and moved quickly to get away, covering his ears.
Five seconds of bullets flying and screaming passed until the room went white and all noise was sucked into one THADOOM! of concussion.
Saul stumbled as the blast tackled him, ramming his shoulder into the bars of the cage. Turning back, he found the door had torn completely off the cage and flipped into the pit, dragging the dead terrorist down with it. The end of it stuck up, bouncing against the rim of the hole. He swung his AK-47 up as the first vampire crawled free.
Soldiers and civilians poured from the cage. The vampire leapt on the back of one man, riding him to the ground with thin arms clutched around the man's chest and long teeth buried into his neck. Blood shot out around the vampire's mouth, spraying wide in a fan across the floor.
A soldier grabbed the vampire's shoulders, trying to pull him off the man. Her feet slipped in the blood and she crashed to one knee.
The second vampire over the edge took her down faster than Saul's eyes could track.
He ran forward, looking for Eliora, shoving people out of his way. More vampires clambered over the edge of the pit, red eyes tracking targets before launching after their prey. The civilians dropped like lambs taken down by lions. The soldiers tried to fight but even the child vampires were too strong and fast for them. He watched as one little girl, not even four feet tall and dainty as a princess, perched on the shoulders of a soldier three times her weight, dug her fingers into his jawline, and ripped his head off in a shower of gore. She bathed in it, giggling as the decapitated body fell to his knees and she tumbled to the floor.
A vampire vaulted at him, sailing through the air. The thing's fingers and toes curled like claws and its chin rubbed its skeletal chest as pointed white teeth gnashed. He barely got the barrel of his rifle up and squeezed the trigger before it was on him. The bullets ripped into the vampire, shredding its back like pulled pork. Its scream stabbed into his head and he pulled the trigger again. Another three-round burst hacked into the thing’s chest and out the other side in a torrent of vertebrae and blood. He shrugged the vampire's corpse off and it fell to the floor like a sack of disjointed bones.
Inside him a switch flipped.
He whipped his gun around, looking for more.
His brain fractured, the pieces crashing into one another. Everything shifted, becoming a sensation, a sight, a sound, a touch, a taste, a smell. All of it falling into the blank void his world had become. Everything was stimuli to be reacted to. Kill or ignore. The raw red state of mind that let him work.
A squeeze of the trigger pumped bullets into the vampire that climbed out first. It had drunk the man under it dry and now rose, its face a slick mask of gore. A fat tongue darted around its lips, scraping thick, filmy blood back into its mouth.
The rounds took it in the temple as it crouched, bursting through skull and tumbling, rolling, rumbling, becoming a swarm of lead that tore the top of his head off like a rotten beehive.
Saul turned and found his next target.
The AK-47 chattered in his hand again. The bullets stitched across the child vampire’s tiny frame, making her jitter like an epileptic as she drank a double handful of blood scooped from the stump of her victim's neck. She fell back and kicked once, twice, and then was still. The severed head stared at her from inches away as she died.
He tracked the gun again, aiming it at the terrorists on the other side of the pit and the vampires attacking them.
Something grabbed his sleeve.
He looked.
On his sleeve was a hand.
It belonged to a woman.
His mind contracted, squeezing down at the sight of her face.
He knew her face.
Eliora.
“Saul.”
He blinked, disoriented as his mind stuttered, synapses firing to comprehend, to pull him out of the white noise of murder he'd slipped into.
“Saul.”
His brain juttered, clickitey, clickitey, click.
“Saul!”
He shivered, cold running down the inside of his spine.
Inside his body.
“I'm here.” he said “I'm back.”
“We have to stop these things.”
A glance showed him that most of the vampires had jumped the pit and were making short work of the terrorists over there. Gunfire popped off, sending flashes out, and screams rose and fell. Most of the terrorists were being eaten by the vampires. The two men who were not Arabs had flipped the exam table on its side and were using it as a shield to fire behind.
He turned and found the concrete around him to be a wash of red sludge, a soup of bodily fluids and viscera. Dozens of civilians and soldiers lay, their bodies too still, their skin too pale to be anything but dead. Mixed in with them were haggard piles of skin and bones, the corpses of the vampires.
A handful of soldiers still stood. They all bled, but were all alive. Three of them had a vampire pinned and were pounding its skull against the wet concrete. Saul heard when the melon split.
The blonde soldier had found a length of rebar and had driven it through the neck of a vampire. The thing jerked and flopped at the end of the steel bar, pulling the soldier forward and back as blood sprayed up her arms and over her face. She sputtered, eyes scrunched closed, but she held onto the rebar until the vampire stopped moving, its legs folding under it.
Two more soldiers held each other, one man pressing his face against the other's chest while sobs wracked him violently.
Saul looked at his wife. “We need to get out of here.” He pushed the magazine release, letting it fall to his feet while fishing out one of the full ones he'd taken from the men he killed. Pressing it home he pulled another from his waist and handed it to his wife.
She reloaded and settled her rifle into her hands. “The truck?”
“It's all we have.”
“Let's go then.”
Their boots sloshed through an inch of blood as they moved, the floor built in a depression. As they moved they signaled the soldiers to follow. One by one they did, all of them moving quickly toward the truck.
As they drew near, the floor began to vibrate under their feet, sending tiny ripples through the puddle.
Saul held out his arm. Everybody stopped.
The vibrations grew worse.
“What is that?” One of the soldiers asked.
Saul didn't answer, his eyes scanning.
The truck was moving.
Not forward, it was shaking, rocking on its suspension.
“Look at the box.” Eliora said.
He looked. The wooden crate had been riddled with bullets, the wood chewed into near pulp. It rocked back and forth, the straps holding it twanging with the stress. One of them popped, snapping in two, the ends flying in separate ways.
Saul and Eliora raised their guns as the crate exploded into a million splinters.
Tiny wooden shrapnel flew at them, peppering his arms and face. He felt the bite of it along his cheek, thankful it missed his eye.
“What the hell is that?” one of the soldiers whispered.
Something that looked like a mound of hay shambled across the bed of the truck, heading toward them. Saul realized it was hair, mounds and mounds of it draping for a dozen meters, all the color of dead wheat, milky and nearly translucent. It caught on the bench seats, pulling back to reveal a woman underneath it all. She hunched over herself, hands clutched around a distended stomach. Her skin had the blue tone of asphyxia, her lips near white. She hissed, lips jerking wide around rotten teeth set in black gums. She lurched along, each footstep bouncing the truck over its shocks even though she stood only five feet tall. She stopped on the edge of the truck bed, perched there and staring at them with sweeping eyes that looked like empty sockets under the shadow of her bangs.
“This one's not like the others.” Saul said.
The vampire took a step forward and dropped to the ground in a flurry of dead wheat hair.
Saul and Eliora fired at the same time.
The AK-47s chattered, spitting bullets that folded the vampire in half. She hit the back of the truck and bounced forward onto her hands and knees.
She crouched, covered by her hair, completely still.
Eliora's voice broke the silence. “Did we…?”
The hair moved, lifting and swaying as if caught in a breeze.
Saul's finger tightened, squeezing the trigger.
A voice shouted behind him, harsh and guttural. He glanced back. The man in the black t-shirt ran toward them, holding a black box in his hand and punching it with the other. Eliora spasmed, hands jerking up, body twisting. Her rifle clattered to the floor. He caught her as she swayed sideways, falling with her to the ground. A soft crackling bzzzzzzzz sounded and she twitched, eyes rolling back in her head. The other soldiers also convulsed on their feet before twisting and crumpling to the ground.
The collar.
Swinging the rifle around he let loose a burst bullets in the direction of the man with the black t-shirt. He was off-balance, holding Eliora's weight as she twitched in his arm, and firing one handed. Most of the bullets missed the man completely but one hit him in the thigh. The wound opened like a flower and the man went down hard, his face smashing into the blood-soaked concrete and bouncing up once before falling flat. The black box skidded away, rolling and tumbling. The man didn't move, didn't rise at all.
Eliora went limp. Her eyelids fluttered before opening. He pulled her as close as possible. She stared up at him, pupils dilated and covering the iris. They flicked like camera shutters and contracted as she came around. Her voice was hoarse. “Neshama?”
“Are you okay?”
She licked her lips, her face scrunching up. “Face is numb. What happened?”
He stood, pulling her up with him. “Later.”
A scream ripped through the room.
The vampire was back on her feet. Her hair swirled out around her, whipping to and fro. Strands of it shot out, toward the soldiers that lay around it. The hairs plunged into them, stabbing through cloth and skin like hypodermic needles. The soldiers writhed in agony. Blood began to seep into the shaft of the hairs lodged inside the soldiers, climbing up each strand and turning it from cellulose white to a sanguine scarlet. The color crept all the way to the vampire's scalp, blushing down her forehead as the blood began to fill her.
Saul spoke out the side of his mouth. “You have to stand. Run to the truck and go.”
“No.”
He looked at Eliora, his eyes dead ashes in their sockets. “Do not argue.” He picked up her rifle in his left hand, pointed them both at the vampire, and began firing as he walked away.
He didn't look back, trusting his wife to make her way to the truck. He fired a stream of bullets at the vampire until the guns locked back. The vampire danced under the hailstorm, anchored upright by the hair that pierced the soldiers who had all gone limp and still. He dropped the rifle in his left hand and hit the magazine release on the one in his right. He felt for another full magazine and came up empty. He shifted the rifle around, spinning it until he held the barrel, still warm in his hands. He swung it back as he drew near the vampire. She hissed at him, tongue flailing the air between slick-wet teeth. Her face was fully flushed from the blood soaked up by her hair when he drove the wooden stock of his weapon into it.
The butt of the rifle cracked across the vampire's skull. The vibration of it jolted up Saul's forearms, clacking his teeth together. The vampire swayed on her feet but didn't fall. He swung again and she raised her arm, catching the rifle and jerking it away. The strap drug down Saul's arm, friction burning the skin in a wide swath. He let it go, swinging the garrote in his left hand. The thin wire snaked around the vampire's throat and he lunged to grab it with his other hand. Yanking it tight, he twisted it together like a bread tie around a loaf. Long strands of hair hissed to the floor, severed by the razor wire. The vampire pulled back, tearing the garrote from his grip. She looked at him with eyes of hate.
His hand was in his satchel when the first hair struck him.
It burrowed deep and true, piercing into the muscle of his shoulder. The pain was sharp and cold, singing through his body like a blade on a whetstone. He watched as the hollow hair filled with his own blood and it wicked away.
The second hair slid under the skin of his hip, caressing across the bone to bite deep into the hollow of his thigh. That one burned.
He pulled his hand out as a full lock of that hypodermic hair peppered his midsection. His eyes went blind as they burrowed, contracting and pulling their way into his abdomen. His ears filled with a roaring. Ice spread across his midsection as the hairs went to work pumping out his blood.
His fingertips were numb and cold, could barely keep their grip.
Red filled his vision.
He was jerked forward as the hair ripped out of his skin.
The pain of that slapped him, white hot and complete from head to toe.
“Saul!”
He looked up at his name and shook his head, trying to see. The world swam and then locked into focus.
The side of the truck was inches from his face.
“Come on, get in!”
Eliora stood out the driver door, yelling at him over the truck bed. He looked down. The vampire lay under the back tire. It sat on her legs, pinning her down. Her hair flailed as she tried to push herself up. The truck lifted an inch, then two, before dropping back down.
His wife had run over a vampire with an American truck in a terror tunnel under Israel.
Insanity.
“Get it together, Neshama!”
He shook himself and took a step. Something snagged his foot. Hair, a lock of hair, still tinged with blood that could be his, had entwined itself around his ankle. He bent, bracing against the side of the truck as his head swam, and picked it up. It dragged along the ground as he walked to the cab and climbed in. His wife watched him from the driver's seat as he wrapped the hair around the long brown stick of Semtex, making sure the strands were deeply embedded. Satisfied, he reached into his satchel and pulled out a simple mechanical timer. Two twists gave them two minutes. It would be enough or it wouldn't.
He tossed the lump of explosive and bloodsucking hair out the window.
“Drive.” he said.
Eliora flicked on the lights and pushed the accelerator.
*
“Mizrahi.”
It wasn't a question but it was his last name. Saul looked up from where he sat outside the medical tent, waiting to hear about his wife's condition. A man stood in front of him who seemed to stretch to the stars. Carved of muscle and distinctly American, he towered over Saul.
The man didn't crouch or move to make it where Saul didn't have to stare up at him. “You left a mess down there for us.”
“I don't know who 'us' is.”
“And that's fine. Wilcox.”
It took Saul a moment to realize the man had just given him a name. “Call me Saul.”
“Want to tell me what happened down there tonight?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” The man's voice made it clear he was not used to being told no.
Saul sighed. “You are not my boss, not IDF, and not my wife. I'll be debriefed and I'd rather just do it once.”
The man looked into Saul's eyes. “I can make this the only time you tell the story.”
Saul believed him. “My wife was captured in the tunnel raid. I went after her. There were terrorists and vampires. We made it out but all the other soldiers captured with her were lost.”
Wilcox grunted. “Terrorists and vampires. Doesn't seem fair to have both.” He dropped to the ground, squatting in front of Saul. “We went down in the tunnel and looked around. Not much to see after you dropped all that concrete.”
Saul shrugged. “I'm demolitions.”
“Is that how you took out the astiyiah?”
“The what?”
“Vampire drinks blood with her hair. Tough as shit, damn near unstoppable.”
“My wife ran her over with a truck.”
Wilcox grunted again. “Good woman.”
“The best I ever knew.”
“You went in alone to save her from terrorists and vampires, I'd say she must be.”
“I didn't know about the vampires when I went in.”
“Would it have stopped you?”
“No.”
“Thought so.” Wilcox stood. Saul pushed himself up to stand with the man. The bandage wrapped around his waist pulled distantly, any other sensation held at bay by the anesthetic the medical team had applied. Wilcox looked at him sideways. “Well, Saul, this is the part where I offer you a job. Want to try and keep the world safe from vampires?”
“All due respect, to hell with vampires. I just want to take my wife home.”
Wilcox smiled and gave a small salute. “Fair enough.”
The man turned and walked away.