There were a few murmurs and nods, but the majority of the men stood stock-still, watching the feeding in dumbstruck horror.
Things moved quickly after that. The vampires were always around our groups, but they never dared come close. They'd tested our safe areas and found them secure. Amazing what a little spray adhesive and garlic powder will do when placed on a door or threshold.
We extended our safe zones little by little, chasing the vampires out of control, then securing the space. That was a timed effort, held in conjunction with driving them out of the engine room. The hatch back aft was booby trapped along with the rest.
This was necessary, you see. If the vampires held either the engine room and reactor or the con, they could destroy us all. We needed both.
Of course, no plan is perfect. Just as we were feeling damned proud of ourselves for taking the boat without a fight and holding it for almost a day, they fired a torpedo tube...one of the two Tomahawkes we had on board. At least, we assumed it was a Nuke. That was what had been staged and ready.
There was silence. With the map on the monitor, I searched for anything close enough for them to have hit.
Fuck me!
There was a small port in the ice-locked northern Russian states not too far off the starboard side.
My mind worked fast. We could listen in on civilian bands. If they took out anything of note with the Nuke, we'd know soon enough. Even if they'd set it off on the ocean floor that close to a population center, it had attracted a hell of a lot of notice, without doubt. Either way, they had probably just started World War III. Every Russian boat and ship within range would be swarming for us. It was time to go deep, go straight south and go like a bat out of hell.
"Fuck me," I grumbled. "They still have another one."
"And the conventionals," Cat Man reminded me. "They can do damage and make a lot of noise with those, too. The only thing in our favor is that this isn't a boomer. No ICBMS."
My frustration got the better of me. "Why the hell did we bring Nukes with us?"
The silence was absolute. I'm sure no one could formulate an answer that wouldn't entice me to pull up my shotgun to open fire, though whether we carried Nukes wasn't a decision anyone in the room had made.
The whoop of the sound-powered phone broke the stillness, and everyone turned to look at it. No one moved.
Again, it was going to fall to me. "I never knew carrying out a mutiny would be such a pain in the ass," I growled, grabbing it up. "Having fun, Clueless?" I asked. I didn't question who would be calling me. Who else would?
"Loads," he gloated. "Like the fireworks? It's like the Fourth, huh? Well, except for the itty bitty mushroom cloud, that is."
Fuck! It was a Nuke.
"If you turn the Earth into molten slag, it's going to be a little difficult for you to get food, you know."
"I won't turn it all to slag. I'll just take out the big players and then enjoy the rest."
"What? You've never read
On The Beach
?" I challenged.
"What's that? Some beach bunny porn novel?"
"I should have remembered my audience. You know... Only you could be stupid enough to pick up a vampire in a bar and become dinner, Greasy."
"I don't recall movie monsters being on my qual card at S1C."
"I don't recall much of anything being on that qual card that wasn't a mercy grade, and I scrubbed as many of those as I could."
"I'm still here, aren't I?"
"Yeah. And, I'm still here. One way or the other, we're getting off this tin can. Where you go after that is none of my concern. Go as far north as you can find settlements and keep your ass there for all I care. Feed on polar bears or something. The only thing I ask is for you to back off and let us go."
"It's not that simple. We have to eat. We're going to eat, Len."
"Eat each other. You're not getting one of us."
His laughter echoed over the line, a truly mad sound, and then he was gone.
I hung the phone back on the hook, my mind working fast. What could his plan be?
His plan, it turned out, was using hoses and seawater to try and wash the garlic off of the men in the Mess Decks. 'Mess' was the right word for what happened. Not only had Clueless forgotten the crosses, but he'd forgotten some of his vampire lore. Shotgun blasts to the heart or neck did a pretty good job of killing them.
I had a momentary rush of hope. If we could kill them all off... The reality of the situation crushed that in moments, the pure math our enemy. We didn't have all that many shotgun shells, and some would surely miss. It would take a lot more bullets from an M-16 or 9mm to accomplish the same level of damage. And, we were facing one-hundred and twenty-six undead. No fucking way could we kill them all! It was better to save the ammo for emergencies like the one we'd just faced.
Worse, the vampires went on some sort of feeding frenzy, probably the smell of blood from their dead buddies. In short order, the bodies had been drained dry and carted off to the torpedo tubes for disposal. One rather overzealous undead tried to lick the cooling blood from the deck plates. That didn't last long. There was wet garlic mixed in with the blood, and he left in disgust.
The next four days were pretty damned tense. I didn't sleep more than a few catnaps here and there, and I don't think anyone else fared better. We had one eye on the vampires roaming the boat and the other on the Russian subs we could hear trailing us.
Of course, we were all worried that there might be another fast attack we couldn't hear trying to trail us as well. At least, the living crew members were worried about it. Not that there was a thing we could do about the situation. Since both boats were so quiet, it was likely we'd crash into each other before either one of us knew the other was there.
Then what would we do? If we tried to run, they'd blast us out of the water. If we admitted what we were doing, they'd blast us out of the water, either because we were mutineers and somebody on board had fired a Nuke at a civilian target without orders...or because they believed nutcases had control of the ship and had fired... Ah, forget that discussion. You get the idea.
Apparently, Clueless decided my idea for keeping themselves alive wasn't half bad. I almost regretted goading him about it three days into our flight from the Nuke incident. Almost... As long as they were living off of each other, they weren't trying to lay into our necks, and that was good news.
The PT went first. I imagine that Clueless got tired of the old man insisting that he was in charge. It's occurred to me many times that vampires have little use for rank outside of who created whom. Since Clueless was the master creator on the sub, he had the clout, and he didn't take kindly to the old man demanding the same standing he'd had before he'd been turned.
After that, they took down their weakest and least useful members to sustain the strongest core, weeding the ranks as I'd once suggested doing with handguns. By the time we neared the port we intended to use, they had weeded themselves down to forty-five vampires. I realize that's still an enormous threat, but it was a hell of a lot better than a hundred and twenty-six, you know.
The port was in chaos. If you want to know the truth, it was hell on Earth. There were riots and panicking people in the streets. We figured the war had started without us. The docks were abandoned, which made offloading twenty-six weary and half-crazed sailors in stealth a breeze.
That was both good news and bad. The good news was that the governments of the world would be too damned busy to worry about the heat bloom on satellite. The bad news was that we'd have to tough it out, hope we weren't shot as spies and try to convince the US government that we weren't defectors or deserters when we finally managed to make it back to a friendly Marine at a consulate somewhere.
Then again, we were leaving an armed US submarine in the hands of a hostile force, but we could fight the right and wrong of that situation with whatever higher power was left alive in a year.
We took our weapons, personal belongings, food and as much 'special supplies' as we could haul with us. As a last challenge, Clueless offered us the chance to join him. I won't repeat what I said to him verbatim, but I'm sure you know me well enough to figure out which four-letter terms of endearment I used. I even told him that the first to follow us would be shot with the remaining shotgun shells.
No shit, there we were: twenty-six completely wired US Navy submariners in civvies, sea bags strapped to our shoulders, weapons in hand, standing on a foreign dock in the North Atlantic. Damned if it didn't feel great to be out of that tin can, better than it had ever felt before, and I'd had ten years of 'before' to compare it to.
Sure, we were standing in hell, fires burning on the horizon.
Fires will keep us warm tonight.
We didn't speak the language.
Hell, a lot of people in this area speak passable English.
We had military IDs but no passports.
So what! Military IDs will get us all over Europe and even home.
I took a deep breath. "Well, let's get the fuck out of here."
"Where are we going to go?" That came from Jakes, his nose dark red and his breath so thick, it looked like cream filling.
"Away from the gunfire. Anywhere but back to the damned black tube of death." Funny, that term had never been more appropriate.
It was cruising away slowly, probably cautious because of the lack of a tug to help them out of the harbor.
We were off the pier and skirting around town when the group surrounded us. We had no question what we faced. We'd seen enough of the undead in the last few weeks to imprint the breed into our senses. Their non-smell gave them away...and the way they moved. Most of all, those red eyes and fangs did.
"Fuck me," I breathed. "Can't I get a break?" The certainty that Clueless knew very well what we'd been walking into assaulted me, making me cold as even the night wind north of the Arctic Circle couldn't.
I didn't question why he didn't tag along for the fun. On the sub, he was king of the vampires. Out here, there were likely higher-ranking ones than him. Better to stay ahead of the war and make his followers think he was top of the food chain than end up someone else's midnight snack when they ran out of humans.
"What the hell is going on here?" Jakes asked in a cracking voice.
"The apocalypse," I guessed. "Only World War III isn't about Nukes and Daisy Cutters, pup."
Not yet, anyway! Sooner or later, someone's going to decide to try an incinerate them all. Then all bets are off. It will be the MOAB then and nothing less.
"It's the war with the vampires."
"Very good," one of the undead answered in a heavy accent.
The ring took one step toward us, and twenty- six crosses came up in unison. They stopped, and the leader scowled at us.
"Just what I'd expect from an American," he spat. "But, how long can you hold out against us?"
I didn't answer, my mind working hard at that. At this longitude, we'd have only a few hours of sunlight per day. Those would probably be best spent sleeping safely. If we went south, we'd gradually gain equal days. If we stayed north, we'd ping pong between the long winter and the bright summer. Either way, we'd be hunted to extinction eventually.
"Petty Officer Len?" Jakes pleaded, his hands shaking.
"Yes, Petty Officer Len," the lead vampire chuckled. "How long can you hold out?"
I smiled, the same manic smile I'd used to scare off JOs on the MSP when I was about to do something highly illegal. The vampire's smile faltered. He was playing with a master, and it was time he learned what a real monster I could be.
"We have tradesmen of all sorts and training to boot." My hand landed on Jakes' shoulder. "And, we like Italian food. Can eat it every damn day." If it meant getting the upper hand for a while, we'd live on garlic bread. I was certain we could find stores of garlic in the ruins. It wasn't like they would touch the stuff, after all.
I met the undead eyes, staring me down. "How long will we fight you? Until we have only a bullet left for each of us, Dracula. Take it to the bank.
"And if any of you are stupid enough to attack us... We've killed your kind before, but try it. You see, we have a couple of mottos we live by. The first goes 'Stupidity should be painful'."
"And the other?" he growled, his eyes a hotter shade of red that warmed my resolve.
"Everything's funny until somebody dies. Then it's fucking hysterical. Eighty-three men have died in the last couple of weeks. I should probably warn you that none were my own."
He backed off a step, scenting the madness of a Nuke submariner in full bloom. Oh, yes. This was one challenge I was more than looking forward to. Seeing the vampire die would be more than hysterical, and enlisted Nukes are anything but stupid.
The End
About the Author
Brenna Lyons wears many hats, sometimes all on the same day: former president of EPIC, author of more than 100 published works, owner of Fireborn Publishing, columnist, special needs teacher, wife, mother...and member in good standing of more than 60 writing advocacy groups.
In her first ten years published in novel-length, she's won 3 EPIC e-Book Awards (out of 15 finalists) and finaled for 3 PEARLS (including one Honorable Mention, second to NY Times Bestseller Angela Knight), 2 CAPAS, and a Dream Realm Award. She's also taken Spinetingler's Book of the Year for 2007.
Brenna writes in 26 established worlds plus stand-alones, poetry, articles and essays. She's a bestseller in indie/e fantasy and horror, straight genre and cross-genres thereof. Brenna has been termed "one of the most deviant erotic minds in the publishing world…not for the weak." (Rachelle for Fallen Angels Reviews) Milieu-heavy dark work is practically Brenna's calling card, with or without the erotic content.
She teaches classes in everything from POV studies to advanced editing, networking to marketing. Brenna enjoys hearing from people who read her work and can be reached by e-mail.