us, roughly where we heard the death of a man a minute earlier.
“It’s coming,” I say. And the lab’s too far away, assuming the door isn’t unlocked. I push Clara into the nearest doorway—for cell number three—and follow her in, closing the door behind us. And then we hold our breath for a thirty count.
“It’s gone,” Clara whispers.
“Maybe.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s a vampire,” I say. “A very, very hungry vampire. They were keeping it in the second cell.”
“There’s such a thing as vampires?”
“Sure.”
It takes her a couple of seconds to readjust her world view and then, “Why the hell are we headed into the middle of the compound?”
“We can’t climb that fence,” I say. “And even if we tried, is that where you want to be when the vampire comes by? Better to find a place to hide until it’s all over.”
“So… wait. What is this room for?”
She’d taken her eyes off the door for long enough to have a look around. I follow her gaze.
The inside of the third cell looks like the interior of an intensive care ward. (Or rather, what they look like on TV. I’ve never been in one.) The room is full of tubes and wires and machines for registering vital statistics. A large bed takes up the very center of the room. The bed’s empty.
“You’ve never been in here?” Clara asks.
“Nope. You?”
“No. I wonder who it was for?”
“I heard moaning coming from this cell. Maybe there was another experiment going on. One I didn’t know about.”
“But on who?” she reiterates.
“Dunno. They’re not here now. And we all know Bob likes to destroy things when he’s done with them, so…”
We hear some more gunfire. I’m beginning to think everyone on the base is armed with an automatic weapon except for me.
“Sounds like that’s a good ways off,” I say. “We should try and chance it now.”
“Chance what?” she asked. “We’re safe here, aren’t we?”
“I’d feel safer in the lab,” I say. Which is sort of true, as the lab is built of sterner stuff and has a big metal door and all that. But I have another reason for wanting to get in there.
I crack open the door and do not end up savagely killed, so I try opening it wider. Still no sudden death. We step out. More screaming from somewhere to our left, and definitely not too close.
“There are like forty or fifty people here,” Clara notes. “Is it me, or does it sound like every one of them is being killed one-by-one?”
“It’s not just you.”
I turn the corner past the row of huts and nearly trip over what’s left of Ringo. Clara nearly does the same, and then in seeing what she had avoided she immediately starts screaming. I clap my hand over her mouth as quickly as I can.
“Quiet down,” I whisper, “Or you’ll bring it right to us.”
I get a nod of understanding from her, so I pull back my hand and kneel down to examine the remains.
He came to final rest on his side, or at least the largest portion of what’s left of him did. One of his arms has been torn completely off, both his legs are broken and lying at some fairly strange angles, and it appears as if several internal organs have been removed with a blunt instrument. It looks like he died in horrible pain, and for a second, I actually feel sympathetic.
I roll the torso. This causes more of the viscera to roll out onto the ground, and I hear Clara actively attempting to control her gag reflex. I also learn the answer to my own personal age-old question: demons do have hearts. I see Ringo’s with my own eyes. But that’s less important than what else I find—the key ring, still attached to his belt. I pick up the ring.
“Adam?” Clara says, her voice freaking out all over the place. “How… are vampires that strong? I mean…”
“They get stronger and faster as they get older,” I say. “This one must be pretty old. Now keep your gun ready. We just need to make it to the lab.”
Chapter 27
At a full sprint, it takes us only about thirty seconds to cross the gap to the door of the laboratory. Feels like a whole lot longer. Unsurprisingly, it’s locked.
“C’mon, open it,” Clara says nervously. I’m holding the key ring up in the light to see if there are any markings to help me identify the correct key. But if there is an indicator, I can’t see it. So I just start trying out keys. There are roughly twenty to choose from.
If things had gone according to plan, Iza would have opened the door—for me and Eve rather than me and Clara—before freeing the hungry vampire that’s probably seconds away from eating us both. Iza’s nowhere to be found, but at least I have the key ring. It almost balances out.
“Just shoot it open,” Clara says.
“It’s a steel door,” I point out. “That’ll waste bullets, make too much noise, and the ricochet will probably hit one of us.”
“Shh! Listen.” More automatic gunfire could be heard to our left. Two, maybe three different shooters.
“It’s not anywhere near us,” I say.
“How do you know?”
“What do you think they’re shooting at?”
All the damn keys look identical. I can’t even imagine how something as big and stupid as Ringo could be expected to tell them apart.
“So what’s with the uniform?” I ask, as much to keep her from panicking, as out of actual curiosity. Or maybe I’m trying to keep myself from panicking.
“I got it from the laundry,” she says distractedly.
“How’d you pull that off?”
“Easy. I’ve had free run of this place since I got here.”
“Yeah?” Five keys and no luck. It’s going to end up being the twentieth one I try.
Clara says, “Bob was trying to get into my pants. Guess he figured that’d be easier if I didn’t think of him as a complete son of a bitch. So he took pains to not treat me like a captive.”
“He told me you were here because you wanted to be.”
“Yeah, he told himself that, too.”
“How about the gun?” I ask. “Or did you find that in the laundry also?”
“It’s a loaner,” she says.
“Somebody loaned you an automatic rifle?”
“You’d be surprised what a cute girl like me can get away with in a camp full of men,” she says with a smile, sounding a bit more like the Clara I remember from New York.
“I knew Helen of Troy,” I point out. “So, no, I’m not all that surprised.”
Eleven. If Ringo doesn’t have the key to the lab on this ring, I’m not so sure what my next step is going to be. As it is, we’re frighteningly exposed under the lab’s door stoop light.
“They teach you to fire it, too?” I ask, regarding Clara’s gun.
“I had a few lessons. Target practice out in the desert.”
“They seem to have taught you well.”
