PROTECTED. Marcus Calvert
thought crossed the Jesuit’s mind and made him wince.
“What about the demons on this world?” Tolson asked worriedly. “The ones walking around, in other people’s bodies? Lord only knows what they’re up to out there.”
Pesmarek grimly paused, turned, and regarded the dead host bodies for a moment.
“Their time will come,” he vowed. “For now, the innocent souls are top priority. If we don’t save them in time, they’ll be too corrupted to enter Heaven.”
The angel flicked Dentraag blood from his blade and continued toward the vault.
“Thank you,” Tolson said, “for answering my prayer and saving my soul.”
Pesmarek stopped just shy of the vault door.
“Don’t thank me,” the angel replied as he pointed the tip of his sword upward. “Thank Him.”
With that, Pesmarek entered the vault and willed its door shut.
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
Deidre Nattens and her son Kyle fled through the fog-shrouded night. Just over 30, the long-haired brunette was beautiful in her black formal dress. Even in heels, she moved with a desperate, athletic grace. Somehow Kyle, a lanky 13-year-old, managed to keep stride. A head shorter than his mother, he wore a brown suit, white shirt, and a black necktie. His blonde hair and grayish eyes were from his father but he had his mother’s face. After several long minutes, they stopped at a familiar street. Both winded and hungry, they anxiously looked around.
“Where do we go?” Kyle asked in-between panicked gulps of air.
Deidre looked back over her left shoulder as she kicked off her high heels. They used to live around here not too long ago. Some of their old neighbors should still be around. One of them would take them in. They had to.
“This way,” Deidre said as she took Kyle’s hand and ran toward Mencer Street.
Exactly twenty seconds later, a pair of black 2012 Durango SUVs rushed out of the fog and screeched to a halt. Virgil Muhes jumped out of the lead vehicle. With him were six other gangbangers. All of them were in their early- to late-20’s and wore dark clothing. They spread out with guns cocked and ready.
The Crypt Happies ran this neighborhood and didn’t have a problem shooting anyone who thought otherwise. Virgil was a “lieutenant” of sorts, with responsibilities that including killing folks like Deidre and Kyle. Huge, black, and packing a modified AK-47, he stopped almost exactly where Deidre did. Virgil looked down, spotted her discarded shoes and smiled through tobacco-stained teeth. The bitch was close, he thought. With a glance around, he spotted the sign for Mencer Street.
“Mencer Street,” he said with conviction. “Split off and squeeze ‘em in. I got the middle.”
His crew hopped into the SUVs and drove off. Virgil ran toward Mencer Street. Along the way, he tried to remember exactly where - on this block - Deidre used to live. She grew up here and blew town when he was a kid. But when her mom got sick a few years ago she and her boy moved back in. Word on the street was that she needed a place to stay anyway. Her kid’s father was abusive, if he remembered the gossip. Deidre’s mom died soon after they got back.
Her mom’s name was … Rudek.
With the name came memories of a two-story blue-and-white house. The gangbanger smiled as he ran a bit faster. He remembered Halloween trick-or-treat runs and how old lady Rudek used to hook him up. Of course, Virgil also remembered stealing her car when he was in high school. Now, he was hell-bent on gunning down the late Mrs. Rudek’s only daughter and grandson.
Deidre and Kyle ran past her mom’s house, which still had a FOR SALE sign in front of it. Deidre stopped, looked around at the other houses, and noted that their lights were all off. She realized that it was so late in the evening that everyone must be asleep.
“Let’s go inside!” Kyle pointed to his grandmother’s house with an eager smile.
“It’s the first place they’d look,” Deidre reasoned. “Let’s try Mr. Oshroe.”
Kyle wiped a thin sweat from his brow and looked over at the well-maintained gray-and-blue abode. It was just four houses away. Deidre took her son by the hand and ran toward it. They reached the steps and Deidre desperately rang the doorbell while Kyle pounded on the metal-barred screen door.
A light came on upstairs.
Deidre pulled Kyle away from the door and shushed him; the boy’s pounding was making too much noise. Precious seconds slipped past. The door opened and a very-sleepy Jim Oshroe appeared. Tall and chubby, the sixtysomething retiree narrowed his near-sighted eyes as he flipped on his porch light.
“Jim!” Deidre smiled with relief. “Thank God you’re home! Please, let us in!”
Oshroe’s eyes widened with fear.
He slammed the door shut just as Virgil rushed into view and fired from the hip. Kyle spun toward him and ate a sixteen-round burst to the face and torso. Deidre saw her son go down and angrily sprouted a four-inch set of vampiric fangs. With a hungry rage in her eyes, she rushed past Virgil’s gunfire with inhuman speed. At the last instant, Virgil reversed his grip on the AK-47 and slammed her in the chest with the rifle’s buttstock. Deidre was so intent on bleeding him dry that she didn’t care … until the stake punched through her chest.
A buddy of Virgil’s had rigged his AK’s buttstock with that little “surprise”: a spring-loaded, oak stake that would spring out on impact. Deidre’s momentum drove her into the stake with enough force to put an exit wound through her back. Virgil barely managed to stay on his feet and hold onto his weapon at the same time.
Too weak to fight or even move, Deidre glared up at him for a seeming eternity. Then her eyes closed as she fell off the stake and died again. As soon as her body hit the sidewalk, Virgil pressed the barrel against her beautiful face and fed her the rest of the clip … just to be sure. Unlike the regular AK-47 rounds, the hybrid wood-and-metal ammo was designed to lodge inside of a body, versus punching through it. The modified rounds would kill a vampire with ease, as long as they hit a major organ or two.
Virgil’s posse drove up, drawn by the sounds of gunfire.
“Heads,” Virgil muttered as he reloaded and looked around.
A few lights had come on. But no one would call the police. They knew better. Virgil anxiously twisted the barrel, which retracted his stake. Two members of his crew pulled out their machetes and beheaded Deidre and Kyle. Neither corpse bled – either from the gunshot wounds, Virgil’s stake, or from the beheading. Even the embalming fluid had been dried out. It meant that they hadn’t fed yet, which was more luck than anything else. Julio (Virgil’s right-hand man) slipped a cigarette into his worried mouth and fired it up.
“How the fuck did these vamps get past us?” Julio asked as he looked around.
Virgil didn’t bother to answer because he didn’t know. Usually, the local coroners and funeral homes let them know when a vamp-related homicide came up. Then they’d stake out a corpse, wait for his/her internal organs to grow back, “re-kill” the poor bloodsucker, and then let the mortician “pretty it up” for the funeral. But these two slipped through the cracks.
Luckily, Little Bo had been banging his girl at the cemetery when Deidre broke out of her coffin. By the time she unearthed her son, Bo had it called in. If the pair of newly-risen bloodsuckers had found a decent hiding place, half the folks on Mencer Street might’ve ended up dead - or vampiric - within a week.
“This shit was intentional,” Tre muttered, an overly-tattooed white guy with a thin blonde beard.
Virgil nodded in quiet agreement. He’d learned to trust Tre’s hunches, a few of which had saved his neck over the years. Two others unfolded black body bags. As they loaded the mother and son, Virgil glared down at his handiwork. In spite of his eighty-or-so kills (of both of humans