Sergei gaped at the other hunter, unable to believe what he was hearing. The last of his men had betrayed him. Terrier had started this. He’d made him look like a joke in front of his men.
Fuck! Terrier. Sergei realized that the big man wasn’t there anymore. He’d sneaked into the bunker while Sergei was distracted by these jerkoffs. Terrier would fucking pay for this.
“Have the fucking head.” Sergei tossed Ivan’s head toward Knuckles. It rolled and stopped at his feet.
Knuckles and Tank looked down at the mutilated head. “What the fuck did you do to him?”
Yegor started to stir and pushed Nestor off him, waking him up. This time, Knuckles’ punch hadn’t killed them. They didn’t wait around to see if his next one would.
Sergei and Pavel were already walking in the direction of the bunker entrance.
“He’s your problem now,” Sergei said. He was going to make every one of them pay for what they had done to him today, and Terrier would be the first.
Chapter Nine
Afana was the Immortal leader of the bunker, and he reigned over his people with fear.
This was no benevolent dictatorship.
Through the day he would sleep and at night he watched the twenty-five monitor screens in the security room. The people on the camera feeds—his people—went about their lives in the bunker like good little drones, blissfully unaware that Afana looked down at them like a god on high, admiring his creation.
That wasn’t too far from the truth.
Afana had tried to think of everything when he had commissioned the bunker so he could live through the nuclear war in his own little kingdom beneath the earth. First and foremost, he made sure he had an endless supply of food to keep himself immortal.
After that, he thought about design. The bunker was a circular structure with six levels. Level One was at the top, closest to the surface. Control was power, and Afana controlled it all from Level One. The floors were made from glass so he could look down at everything if he felt so inclined.
The middle area of each level was the social area, and there were metal staircases at the sides with guards on each level to make sure that people stayed where they belonged.
The bunker also had open sections which Afana used to travel quickly through the levels or to drop traitors down. He’d make an example of traitors he caught on camera, dragging them to his level at the top. Afana ordered everyone to watch, and they did as they were told.
He’d open his mouth, exposing his fangs, and sink them into his victim’s neck, draining their body of blood. Afterward, he would drop the body through the open area in the floor so it would crash on Level Six, where the women would clean up the mess.
There were cameras everywhere, and Afana watched everything, just like he was doing now. The cameras made it impossible to hide. Two levels hosted sleeping quarters for the men, another was reserved for the women, and all levels and tunnels were packed with the resources the bunker needed to operate.
The bunker had kept its inhabitants safe for two hundred years now, but those years were beginning to show. Some of the white paint was peeling off the brick walls, and the bare parts had coppery drip stains on them from leaks. The bunker hadn’t been well maintained, to say the least.
He tapped his lips thoughtfully. Perhaps his subjects needed some motivation to keep their home in better condition. The only question was whether to use the carrot or the stick.
They shouldn’t need persuading at all, in his opinion. He’d expected them to be grateful for him keeping them safe and fed. They owed their lives to him. But like the cattle they were, they couldn’t be expected to behave with dignity and class. They were filthy creatures without minds of their own. This became clear early on.
Sadly, his human cattle had been a necessity ever since Afana had met Randal, the vampire who had turned him. The blood that had once run through Afana’s veins had been poisoned by leukemia. Randal had saved his life, but in the process, he had given Afana a new disease. Well, that was how Afana thought of it. With the new blood, he was no longer able to withstand the sunshine.
This had all happened before the world went to shit.
Afana had gathered all the best hematological and scientific minds from around the planet. They had been working on a cure for Afana so he could become a daywalker.
He had begun to hope, when the WWDE happened and somehow the nanocytes changed. Afana thought that it had something to do with the fallout which blanketed the world after the nuclear holocaust. Nanocytes began showing up in his cattle, and at first he feared they would turn into vampires and become strong like him.
Out of a mixture of fear and hope, he had the infected cattle pruned from the herd, and they became test subjects for the scientists.
Over the years the original scientists had died in the bunker, leaving Afana with the watered-down versions of them, in the form of their descendants.
The scientists had taught their children everything they knew before they died, but knowledge got lost from one generation to the next, and the end result wasn’t the same.
Now, after two hundred years, Afana was no closer to finding a cure to his sunlight dilemma. He sat in the bunker, shielded from the sun, and he felt like his body was a prison. The need to escape it was stronger than any feeding urge. He could not, and would not, live like this forever.
Sweat rolled down Ryder’s face as she moved through the swamp. She tried to get through it as quickly as she could, but that was easier said than done. Every step felt like a monumental effort.
Ryder took a gulp of water—more than she meant to—but it was too late now.
