The Children of the Sun (52 page)

“That’d be a plus,” Two said.

“Is everyone back?”

“Everyone except the people holding the stairs.”

“Perfect. You guys go, too. Far wall, and you might want to get behind something. I’m not kidding.”

“What about you?” Theroen asked. “That cord will not reach the far wall.”

“I’ll manage,” Tori said. “I’m not going to blow myself up unless I know it’s going to take out the Emperor at the same time. Don’t worry about it.”

“If I wasn’t worried about you, you’d still be playing for the other team,” Two said.

“Yeah, and if you had worried enough to not leave me in Ohio in the first place, I’d never have gotten wrapped up in this shit. You want to get back into this?”

Two sighed. “No, I guess I don’t.”

“Good. So go. I’m going to call up the rest of the troops.”

Two opened her mouth to say something else, realized it wasn’t worth it, and stopped. She took Theroen’s hand and the two of them turned and ran down the hallway. She could hear Tori yelling out – in the vampire language, no less – to the few vampires who remained in the stairwell. After a moment more, new footsteps sounded out in the hall as they began to evacuate.

By the time Two and Theroen had reached the far end of the warehouse, the other vampires were charging into the room as well, moving at a full run. Two turned in time to see Tori coming through the door, holding the extension cord in her hand. She button-hooked around to the left, and stood for a moment by the power outlet she intended to use. She glanced over at Two and held her eyes for a moment. Two nodded.

Tori smiled, turned, and jammed the plug into the socket. There was the slightest pause, just a fraction of a second, and then the explosions came, three distinct blasts that shook the entire building. The broken door between the warehouse and the hallway was blown off its remaining hinge by a huge plume of flame; it flew the length of the room, nearly crushing a few Burilgi who happened to be standing in its path. The jet of flame reached halfway across the space, and the assembled vampires were pummeled by a heavy, hot shockwave full of shrapnel and debris. For a moment Two wondered if they were going to be incinerated, but the heat began to dissipate, the flames dying down and receding into the hall.

Two found herself looking for Tori, but the entire front of the room was filled with black smoke, and it was impossible to see whether the other woman had survived. Then a silhouette appeared, and in another moment Tori burst out from the smoke, coughing and stumbling toward them.

“Fire extinguishers!” she gasped, and pointed toward a yellow metal cabinet near one of the garage doors. “Get fire extinguishers! The hallway’s burning up!”

Chapter 25
Aftermath

Vanessa’s ears were ringing, and for what seemed a lengthy period of time, she was unable to do anything more than ponder just how inaccurate that turn of phrase was. The noise wasn’t anything like a ringing. It was a piercing, high-pitched shriek that seemed to drive through her skull and into her brain. The noise made it hard to think, and so she tried instead to focus on the other sensations her body was providing.

Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t feel quite ready to open them, but she could tell that she was lying face down on a hard surface. There was grit pressing against her cheek and her lungs were burning again, like they had in the days immediately following the attack on the cathedral.

As an experiment, she tried wiggling her toes. Those still worked, so she moved on to her fingers and felt them move as well. That pleased her; non-functioning digits were never a great sign. Now if she could only get the not-ringing-but-shrieking in her ears to stop.

She felt someone touch her back, and then words were making their way through the shrieking noise, muffled and indistinct, like a conversation half heard through thick glass. After a few moments more, the sounds began to come together.

“Captain, wake up!”

I’m not the Captain
,
Vanessa thought.
You want the indestructible chick with the bad attitude
.

Then she remembered that she
was
a captain now. She had been made one just before Charles had died. When had that been? She could remember the funeral service, but not whether it had been weeks ago, or months. Everything seemed very confused.

The voice spoke again, still urgent, and this time the words seemed to be coming from someplace much closer. “OK, Captain. I guess I’m dragging you.”

She felt someone rolling her over from belly to back and then felt hands under her armpits. The grit on the floor that had been pressing into her face now began to slip down the back of her pants, the sensation far from comfortable. It was this, as much as anything else, that finally forced Vanessa to open her eyes. They took a moment to focus, but then she saw that she was being hauled backward by a young man – he looked familiar – whose hair was twisted into wild, disheveled tangles. His face was covered in scorch marks.

“Don’t I know you?” she asked, or thought she asked, but the words must not have come out right because when the man looked down at her, it was with an expression of pure confusion.

“What, Captain?”

“I know you,” Vanessa tried again, this time a statement, because now she was sure. The pieces of her mind seemed to be slipping back into place in great chunks, now, and in a moment more she was able to summon his name up from the black depths of her memory.

“Jackson,” she said, and then, “Private, what the hell is going on? What are you doing?”

“I’m dragging you down the fucking hall to keep you from being swarmed by fucking vampires,” Jackson growled between gasps of exertion. “Ma’am.”

“What are you talking …” she began, and then she remembered all of it, the images coming to her so suddenly that they seemed almost to replace her vision. The barricades, yes; she had been preparing to toss the grenade and then lead the rush into the smoke when all of a sudden a tremendous ball of fire had come rolling toward them.

“Private, let me go. Let me go right now!”

Vanessa could feel her strength returning, and with it her sense of self. The otherworldly confusion was dissipating, taking with it the shrieking sound in her ears, and she was tired of feeling chunks of concrete trying to shove their way down the crack of her ass.

“They’re going to be here any minute!” Jackson said.

“Yes, and we’ll move a lot faster if we’re both on our fucking feet, so let me go. That’s an order, Private!”

“All right. Yes, ma’am,” Jackson said, and he took his hands away from her armpits. Vanessa raised her right arm and Jackson took her hand, hauling her to her feet. Once there, she swayed and fell sideways into him.

Jackson caught her as best he could, and Vanessa could feel his hand cupping her right breast. For a moment, she had an absurd flashback to the time in her fifteenth year when she and a fellow cadet had spent perhaps twenty furious, sweaty minutes together in a broom closet before being discovered by a Sergeant who’d made them run laps for the next three hours. She regained her balance laughing.

“Not the best time to cop a feel, Private,” she said.

“That is the single last thing on my mind right now,” Jackson told her, removing his hand.

Vanessa nodded. “How long was I out?”

“Not long,” Jackson said. “A big chunk of something must’ve hit you in the back of the head, because your whole neck and back are covered in blood. I crawled over to you once it seemed like the flames had died down.”

“Where are the bats?”

“Coming. Some guys from the Medic’s room can still fight. They pushed forward and engaged, but the barricade’s blown to shit and now all three elevators are open again. Bats are just pouring out of them. Our guys won’t hold the line long, and I had to get you out of there.”

Vanessa ran her hands over her face, trying to collect her thoughts. “Shit, I lost the grenade. I … what happened to the others?”

“Most of them are dead,” Jackson said, his expression grim. “A couple more might just be unconscious. Anyone who was still awake is fighting.”

“Did you see Carrie?”

“Ma’am, I don’t even know who that is.”

“God damn it.” Vanessa looked back toward the elevators, but the smoke was now much worse than before. She couldn’t see anything.

“Jackson, this is bad. We can’t hold this level, now, and they won’t be able to hold the staircase either. The bats are going to hit level two. I have to get down to the Emperor’s quarters.”

“What about the others?” Jackson asked.

“They’ll either fall back or get overrun. Trust me, they’ll figure that out on their own.”

“Captain, I don’t … what do I do?”

“Get to the Command Center before the bats do. We’ll be regrouping there and will need all hands to hold the fort. My job … listen I don’t have time to tell you why, but I have to get to the Emperor. I don’t have a choice.”

Vanessa heard someone scream not far away, the kind of sound that she knew meant another body had been added to the count. She hoped it was a vampire, feared it was one of her soldiers, and understood that she would never know the truth. She could hear running footsteps moving toward them. If they belonged to the enemy, Vanessa didn’t want to be caught out in the open. She clapped Jackson on the shoulder and said, “Time to fall back. Let’s go, Private.”

* * *

She parted ways with Jackson at the entrance to the Emperor’s quarters, a single, unassuming steel door that opened into a hallway unlike any other in their headquarters. Lined with exquisitely-worked teak and mahogany panels – themselves carved and split into intricate designs that reflected the Children’s Incan origins – it also boasted a stunning amount of inlay work, crafted from gold and turquoise and mother of pearl. Vanessa had no idea who had built the hallway – it was surely not anyone who still lived in the base – but it must have been a craftsman or craftsmen of substantial skill. She couldn’t imagine how long the project had taken, and found herself wondering what the Emperor’s chambers themselves might look like.

The floor was dark grey slate cut in massive slabs. The ceiling extended so far above her head, and above the chandeliers that hung at fifteen-foot intervals and bathed the hall in a soft, warm light, that she couldn’t see what it looked like. At the end of the hallway was a large, open area, and it was here that the men sent to guard the Emperor had congregated. There were six of them, including the lieutenant who Colonel Miller had ordered to lead the defense. He was visibly relieved at her arrival.

“What’s the situation, Captain?” he asked as Vanessa made her way toward them. “We heard … well, it sounded like explosions, but that can’t be—”

“It
was
explosions,” Vanessa said, cutting him off. “The bats blew the doors off the elevators and overran the first sublevel. Now I’m here to take command. That’s the situation.”

“Oh. D-did Colonel Miller send you here to reinforce the position?”

“No, I sent myself. HQ is swarming with bats, Lieutenant. The people in the CC can take care of themselves. I’m more worried about the Emperor. If the enemy gets this far, it’s our job to fill that fucking hallway up with bodies.”

“Uh … yes, ma’am.”

“We’re here until someone who outranks me says otherwise. I haven’t heard from Colonel Miller, but I’m absolutely sure this is what he’d want.”

“I’m not trying to question you, Captain,” the lieutenant said.

“Good. What’s your name?”

“Baker. I was … I came up a few years before you did.”

“Yeah. You used to call Carrie Brennan ‘Scarface’ behind her back.”

“I guess I did,” Baker admitted.

“Right,” Vanessa said. “Consider this your chance to get in my good graces, then.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They lapsed into a silence that Vanessa imagined was not entirely comfortable for the rest of them. She didn’t know whether Baker and Carrie had ever spoken to each other outside of the requirements of their duties or not. Perhaps he, too, thought she had a snake tongue and whispered rumors about her with the other soldiers. Vanessa didn’t care; at the moment there were more important things to worry about.

It wasn’t long before their silence was disturbed. After less than fifteen minutes, Colonel Davis burst through the door with three majors and a crowd of soldiers following him. He stopped short when they came to the end of the hallway, head tilted, looking at Vanessa in surprise.

“Captain Harper?”

“That’s me, sir,” Vanessa said.

“Last I heard, you were on the first sublevel.”

“We couldn’t hold the position after they blew up the elevators, sir. Too many of them. I decided that it would be best if I came down here to another bottleneck to try and protect the Emperor, rather than being swarmed and killed.”

Davis considered this and nodded. “Sound decision. Listen, Captain, they’re evacuating the CC. There’re too many bats and they’ve done too much damage to the facility. Miller’s refused to go – I guess he’ll hold it to the death – but Palowski’s already left with his people. I’m going to take the Emperor through his personal tunnel. We’ve made sure the bats won’t be able to get to our data or stop the explosion before the place goes up.”