Scenes from an Unholy War (5 page)

“I’d hate to ask that of a sick man,” Rust said, grinning as he fought something in his turbulent heart. His smirk was directed at himself and his own weakness, which was forcing him to rely on D.

On the western edge of the village were three vacant lots of about four hundred square yards each, where travelers looking to economize on their lodgings had set up camp. There was a little campfire burning on the nearest lot. The smell of roasting meat drifted through the air. Rust thought back on the bustling dining room and saloon he’d passed on his way out there. This village would probably be raised to the rank of a full-fledged town soon.

There were seven figures around the campfire. They were all sucking down coffee, wine, or nutrient drinks. Having taken a horse instead of the skeleton vehicle, Rust hitched it to a post by the road and headed over to the campfire with his right hand still tucked in his coat.

“One of the guys who was out here has been arrested.” Looking over the faces that turned in his direction, Rust continued in a stern tone, “He’s got cohorts. Who was with him?”

All the faces that had faced him looked away again. You couldn’t live very long as a drifter on the Frontier if you worried too much about what local lawmen had to say.

There was no answer. One of them took a bottle of booze away from his lips and drew a deep breath.

“I’ve got no choice, then. You’ll all have to come with me. We’ve got a lie detector back at the sheriff’s office.”

This time he got a reply.

“What’s a kid like you want?”

“You want some milk, is that it?”

“If you don’t mind an old man like me, you can come over and suck on my titty—how about that?”

They exploded in laughter.

Still chortling, one of them picked up a bottle of booze. “What the—” he exclaimed, holding the bottle at arm’s length. His laughter had become a cry of shock. An iron arrow had been shot through the bottle.

“Wh—when the hell did you . . .” the middle-aged man sputtered, having fallen back on the ground before trying to inch away.

“You’re coming with me,” Rust declared in a firm tone.

The men rose in unison—not that they were ready to comply. Rather, each of them was going for the weapons on their hips or backs.

“You little punk!”

As one of them grabbed his longsword and kicked off the ground, the giant of a man beside him drew back on his short bow. The wind whistled, and the man with the longsword let out a cry as he grabbed his right shoulder. At the same time, a strident sound rang out.

The man with the short bow gaped. He’d fired an arrow at the sheriff, but it’d vanished. No, it’d been
deflected
. By an arrow Rust had shot.

“Freeze,” the lawman snapped, short bow in hand, and this time it had the desired effect. “There was a guy out here who could control bats. Varroa was the name. Who was with him?”

The men exchanged glances. Giving Rust a look of suspicion, a plump, bearded fellow said, “You’ve got it all wrong, Sheriff. He was by himself from the very start.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“Did that fucker try something?”

“He attacked me, and he got killed.”

Scratching roughly at his stubbly neck, a different man in a red shirt said, “When you say he got himself killed, don’t you mean
you
killed him?” He was squinting at the lawman.

“He had a falling-out with his cohorts. That’s why I’m out here.”

Pursing his lips, the man in the red shirt said, “You’re talking about a falling-out, but he never said a word to any of us.”

“He sure didn’t!” another man said, pointing to the far end of the vacant lot. “He hardly ever even came out of that tent of his. If he had any friends, maybe they were in there.”

By Rust’s estimation, they weren’t lying to him. After telling some of them to take their wounded friend to the medical center and ordering the man with the short bow to leave town immediately, he investigated Varroa’s tent. He found nothing there except the bare essentials for survival. If the man had made contact with anyone in the village, he’d gone to great lengths to erase any evidence of it.

—

“Welcome home, dear,” Elena said, wiping her hands on her apron. Apparently the man’s wife had been right in the middle of washing some dishes.

Quickly putting the item he carried into a leather bag, the man inquired, “Agnus gone to bed already?”

“Oh yes, hours ago.”

“Yeah, I guess that’d be about right. What time is it now?”

Furrowing her brow, Elena replied, “Well, it must be around nine o’clock.”

“I’m starved. I ate the dinner you packed me, but it wasn’t enough.”

Elena stuck her smiling face out of the kitchen, saying, “Don’t you smell that, Billy?”

He then started to sniff. “A pie?”

“Right you are! A mountain-grape pie, to be exact. It’ll keep you filled for the next three days.”

Hugging his wife, Billy showered her with kisses.

“Whoa, slow down there—I mean it,” she said, her voice growing strained.

Billy’s heart stopped. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and though he tried to sound casual, his tone was probably a little tense.

Elena pressed her nose close to her husband’s collar. “Do you smell blood or something?”

“Oh, right. I cut through the hunting grounds. They were butchering a megamouth croc there. I probably got some of the smell on me,” he said in a rather composed voice. This time, Billy was sure of himself.

“You don’t say.” Satisfied, Elena pulled her head back, then walked away. “It’ll be finished baking any minute now.”

Giving a satisfied grunt, Billy watched his slender wife close the door again before opening the mouth of his bag and pulling out the object he’d tossed into it earlier. He knew he should’ve cleaned off all that blood. Going into the forest where he’d taken prey before, he’d found an unexpected target, but then he’d been rudely interrupted and he’d just managed to make his escape. Next time, he’d have to finish the whole thing properly.

He gazed at the bloodstained black steel with rapture. It was a footlong butcher knife.

chapter 3

I

—

A
fact of life on the Frontier, outlaw groups had been described
as a terror that stained the lives of peace-seeking villagers with vermilion fear. Each faction had its own character. Though there were some groups that merely plundered and would never kill, many others would mercilessly slaughter all save the women. The women would be sold to slave traders and taken to distant lands, where most of them were purchased by brothels. That was still better than some situations; at least they survived. About 70 percent of the outlaws who plagued the Frontier were heartless scum—demons that liked nothing better than to annihilate entire villages. Law-enforcement organizations formed patrols with considerable numbers of men and stationed peacekeeping forces at strategic points on the Frontier, but their efforts simply weren’t concerted enough and their numbers were too few for a region so vast. Day after day, merciless fiends slipped through their fingers like water through a sieve, mocking the patrols and running rampant.

This is where the pseudo vampire’s gang fell. If you were to ask even a two-year-old what they feared most, in more cases than not this brutally efficient gang would be the answer, and their dark, violent acts were beyond numbering.
Pseudo vampire
was a term used to describe people who’d been bitten by vampires but hadn’t become true monsters—due either to some whim of the Noble or its destruction before the change was complete—leaving these victims stranded between life and death. Although such people were generally disposed of, either by their village’s leadership or by its mobs, a few managed to escape, though fewer still were the ones who were spared the typical curse of the pseudo vampire—madness and an abhorrence of daylight. Though nothing compared to a genuine Noble, they still possessed monstrous strength equal to that of ten men and a fairly indestructible nature, able to live without food or drink as long as they had blood for sustenance. What’s more, these fiends could move about in the midday sun like human beings, something Nobles and even dhampirs couldn’t do.

And the pseudo vampire in question was cruel—packing harmless villagers, male and female, young and old, into huts before setting fire to them. Purposely killing children in front of their own parents. Letting the monsters he’d brought with him devour the children. Or, when he didn’t feel like drinking blood, he would make parents fight their offspring or siblings fight each other—something his Noble blood enabled him to do.

He was also callous—on very rare occasions he’d have the poor luck to run headlong into a posse of lawmen, and when critically injured, the pseudo vampire would leave his underlings there and escape alone. There were more than a hundred such incidents recorded. And generous—the pseudo vampire wasn’t out for riches, or even sweet blood. Merciless and wholesale slaughter was what he desired, with the pillaging being done by his followers, and since the loot was as worthless as dirt to him, he let his underlings keep it all. It was due to this simple economic incentive that some people had no qualms about joining up with such a notoriously brutal group. They had dubbed themselves the Black Death gang. There were sixty of them, each a beast without compunction about killing women or children.

The day after the meat-cleaver killing, the outlaws reached the barren plains about thirty miles to the south of Geneve. As might be expected, it was a desolate and endless expanse of nothing save dirt. The winds that blew there were definitely far colder than in other places. The grasses that grew there were despised by the sun. And the people who lived there had surely been forsaken by God.

“Boss—there’s a house!” one of the scouts riding at the front of the group shouted, pointing to a spot in the distant expanse of black. This was a man with eyes so sharp they could make out a pebble a dozen miles away in the darkness.

While his lieutenants around him brought antiquated binoculars up to their eyes, the man who’d been informed of the existence of the house only squinted a bit. “You’re right,” he said with a nod, his lieutenants shrugging their shoulders. They should’ve been used to this by now, as it was their leader’s nature to respond in such a manner.

Actually, he was rather generous and an excellent leader. But that wasn’t all it took to keep a band of godforsaken outlaws under a tenuous control. The only thing that could hold together men like this, who believed in strength alone, was an even greater power. This, their boss possessed. Because once, he’d been human. He’d had parents and siblings. He’d supported a wife and children. He’d been well liked by his neighbors. He’d had a taste for hard bread and cheese and venison steaks. He’d gotten up early in the morning, and gone to bed every evening. He’d prayed to God by the light of morn, and sworn at vespers’ bells that he’d live his best again tomorrow. He’d had hopes and dreams.

But now, he was a pseudo vampire. He sat astride a black horse covered with iron plates, and those pieces of armor were etched with a hundred human skulls. His overgrown hair covered the right half of his face, while his constantly exposed left eye was eternally bloodshot, perhaps due to the sunlight. Lips that’d once pressed against those of the woman he loved had forgotten what that felt like, but they’d acquired a toxic vermilion hue after being smeared with the blood of more than a thousand—all human. For weapons, he had a pair of longswords crossed on his back that were the work of one of the southern Frontier’s preeminent blacksmiths. The blades were forged of steel wrapped around a high-density durium core, and in his hands they’d slashed a Noble in two and kept him from healing again.

And one thing more—he desired only blood. All nostalgia, all memories of kindnesses that’d been done to him had been driven into the far reaches of forgetfulness as hunger and a lust for murder grew with each passing day. In truth, what he desired more than blood was slaughter. It filled a hunger that burned seductively in the darkest depths of his psyche like a shadowy fire, stronger even than his physical hunger. The problem was that he tried his very best to ignore it. If he didn’t acknowledge it, he could kill as many people as he liked without it ever bothering him.

“What’ll we do, Boss?” the scout asked.

“The usual,” he replied. That was his way of telling them he’d lead the charge.

“Yeah, but it’s just one little house. Let us take care of it.”

The leader knew very well his scout had no ulterior motives for saying that. “Okay,” he said, his laughter freezing his faithful underling. “One little house out in the wilderness. People living where no human being should. Go right ahead.”

In no time, three riders galloped away, kicking up the dark earth. Once they were in the distance, the leader told the rest of his gang to wait there, and then followed after the trio alone. Behind him, he could feel the tension growing in the group of more than fifty men.

When he was still about two hundred yards from the log cabin, he heard a gunshot. Several more followed, and then he heard a faint cry that made him give his steed’s flanks a kick, conjecture as to the fate of his henchmen putting a callous grin on his lips.

As he got closer, the voices became clearer.

“What the hell
are
you?”

“No, stay back! Our boss is even tougher than you!”

“Help! Please, help me!”

Then there was a gunshot, and the sound of a table being knocked over.

Up on his steed, he panted a little. His expectation was so great, the beating of his heart reverberated through his entire body. This would probably be the most fun he’d had in quite some time.

As he reached the cabin, the door opened and a bloodied man appeared. It was his scout. The man’s right hand was pressed to the nape of his neck. The vermilion hue spilling from between the scout’s fingers ignited the darkness in the leader’s eyes and soul. The scout noticed him there. He’d ask for help—but no, the scout whirled around instead. Was he trying to get away from his own boss?

“Seth,” the leader called out softly.

The scout’s movements seemed to creak to a halt.

“Where are you going? Come here.”

“Ye—yessir,” the scout said, turning around. Gore continued to stream between his fingers. He looked as if he’d been soaking in a bathtub full of blood.

“Were Gass and Muradashi killed?”

“Yessir,” the scout replied, but he seemed to ask,
How did you know that? And why are you so calm about it?

“And the one who did it—was it someone like me?”

“. . . Yessir.”

“How many are there?”

“Two . . . A married couple.”

“Both like me?”

“. . . Yessir.”

“Good work. Now you can rest.”

“Wha . . .” the scout said, gazing stupidly at an object that had been thrust in his face.

There was a small black circle—not an inch across. The incendiary round it fired shot through the scout’s throat and into his body, breaking apart as it struck his spine, at which point the brezene incendiary compound within it sparked to life. Six-thousand-degree flames welled up. The expansive force of the fire surpassed the limits of the scout’s body, and in a heartbeat he popped like a balloon.

The flames also assailed the horse, clinging to its armored plates. Though the steed tried to back away, its rider wouldn’t let it.

“Hang in there. I’ll stand it, and so will you.”

He gazed down at the flames creeping up his boots. The heat-, flame-, and water-resistant artificial leather slowly burned away, and the six-thousand-degree heat reached his flesh.

“Could a genuine Noble stand this? Or would they die, driven mad by the heat, then rise again? They’re such fucking masochists.”

The leader got down off his horse. The animal bolted away, as if that were exactly what it’d been waiting for. It was trying to put out the flames that enveloped its legs.

As he headed for the door, the man used his left hand to draw another weapon—a twenty-three-millimeter automatic handgun tucked through his belt. The flames had begun to spread to the wall of the cabin.

The second he stepped inside, he was greeted by a terrible, foul odor. As it entered his nostrils and coursed through his body, it was so overpowering that he came to a halt and even felt a bit dizzy. It was a sickeningly sweet smell. Abhorrently pure.

“I smell blood,” he declared.

But two fifty-millimeter shotgun shells had been waiting to empty their contents into the right half of his chest.

—

II

—

The close range and angle of the shot kept him from being knocked over. In fact, the blast went clean through him.

“What’s this?” he asked, the danger of the situation finally shaking him from his sweet intoxication. His left hand probed the crater in his chest. “It’s plain gone,” he muttered, looking forward again.

The man holding the double-barreled shotgun looked like an ordinary farmer.

Pain began screaming through the leader’s body. To escape it, he turned.

The green shirt the farmer wore was damp and black.

“That’s my men’s blood, isn’t it?” the leader managed to say. He hated the way the pain made his voice quaver.

Saying nothing, the farmer cracked open his shotgun and removed the enormous shells. White wisps of smoke still rose from them.

“That’s not like what you’d use on a human, is it?” the leader said, pointing feebly.

The farmer took two fresh fifty-millimeter shells out of his chest pocket and loaded them into his weapon. There was the sound of the gun clicking shut again.

“What the hell are you?” the farmer asked.

“I’m the same as you.”

The farmer could be heard grinding his teeth. Shooting a glance over to the window and his wife, who looked to be about the same age he was, he quickly looked back, saying, “I thought the two of us could live in peace out in a place like this, fake Nobility or not. Truth is, that’s just what we’d been doing for the last decade. But then you show up . . .”

Gunfire rang out.

BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM!

As the leader emptied his handgun wildly, it delivered a comfortable kick to his hand that was more than a human being could’ve handled, and the top half of the farmer’s head was blown away. The outlaw’s wrist was about to break. The bones creaked. It felt good. Really good. Ricocheting off the back wall, bullets shattered commemorative plates that hung on the walls. The glass was blown out of the window, and gigantic holes opened in the wife’s chest and abdomen.

“Listen to the song of death. This is its melody. It’s comforting. So comforting! Won’t you die listening to it? Please, die now.”

Suddenly, there was silence. The slide on the handgun remained back. He didn’t bother to put in a fresh clip. Half of the blown-away portion of his chest hadn’t regenerated yet. Having been knocked back against the wall, the farmer and his wife were trying to rise again. Their wounds were starting to close. Their injuries were different than his. The rate at which pseudo vampires recovered varied based on the physiology of the individual.

“Just as I thought—you two aren’t going to die after all,” the leader said, his tone choked with sadness. “You can’t die, can you? You can’t. Well, doesn’t that just make you sad? Doesn’t it?”

“We gave up on sadness a long time ago,” said the farmer’s wife. “And we lived here in peace. We thought we’d do so for the rest of our days. You ruined everything. Your friends will be along shortly, I’m sure. We’re going to kill them all. But before we do, we’re going to make you pay.”

“Luna!” the farmer cried out. “Stop it. I’ll kill him now. Don’t get a whiff of the scent of blood. Control yourself. Go on outside!”

“It’s no use. It was always going to be like this. I knew it from the very time you suggested we live out here—so I’m just not going to fight it anymore!”

His wife’s mouth opened as if this were something that’d been a long time coming. Her lips and mouth were both the hue of blood. But it was the white of her fangs that was truly eye catching.