CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The End Begins Again

 

That fucking vampire.

Brickert felt the air sucked out of him. He couldn’t catch a breath. His temples pounded. His heart felt like it was ready to kick its way out of his chest.

That motherfucking piece-of-shit vampire.

Coburn was supposed to be dead and crispy, crushed by the collapsed floor of that old theater in New York. That was years ago. And now? He was here?

It didn’t seem possible. For a moment, Brickert seriously entertained the notion that he had died years ago and that this was Hell. To see that clown-king fleeing in a Twin Huey chopper was one thing. To see that God-forsaken vampire up there with him felt like it was designed to punish him personally.

Brickert manned the .50 cal and again lifted it skyward.

He put the vampire in his sights.

And then he moved the gun to the left. He fired a fusillade of .50 rounds into the ass-end of the chopper. He prayed that those bullets did their job, and it wasn’t long before he saw that they did. Out of a trio of holes in the back, fluid sprayed even as the chopper lifted up and gained distance, pressing forward like an eager hummingbird. The bitch was leaking fuel.

Brickert finally found his breath and sucked in a lungful.

“No,” he said, grinning. “Fuck you, vampire.”

 

The Bitch Beast lifted her broken body, rising up out of the carcasses of her brothers, her sisters, her children—what they were she had no name for, no deep understanding, she only realized that once they had been connected, but now they were scraps of meat perforated by searing shards of angry metal.

She, too, had been torn ragged. But they had taken it head-on. Their heads and faces hung on shoulders only barely, turned to pulp and splinters of bone.

They were gone from this world.

She, however, was not. But she needed sustenance, and feeling no more loyalty toward her ruined companions, she knelt down and began to eat of their flesh and drink of their black blood. A glorious and wretched sacrament.

 

The sun was coming up, soon.

Coburn could feel it.

So when the warning began going off in the helicopter—an insistent beeping that they could hear even over the chopper’s rotors—the vampire did not know what the hell was going on.

But he learned soon enough. Thuglow leaned over the seat, pale, sweaty, and he mouthed a phrase that nobody else could hear but Coburn.

We’re leaking fuel.

Shit.