Draculas Page 28

  Adam pulled the trigger.

  Clay

  HE ducked into the report room--a landlocked cubicle just off the OB nursing station, where one shift briefed the next on the floor's patients and their status. He'd been tempted to head straight for the stairs but didn't know how many draculas he'd run into along the way. Once they caught the scent of that blood, they'd come swarming from all directions. He had north of fifty .40 caliber rounds for the Glock, but knew from his first foray into the ER that it took a good three hits to put down a dracula. One on one, that was okay, but if he got swarmed he'd go down.

  He closed the door and plunged into perfect darkness.

  Didn't know if his hacks on the H-E rounds had been successful. No way to test them.

  So he locked the door, found a chair, and waited.

  Soon he heard movement outside--feet scraping the floor as they passed. Someone rattled the doorknob. A dracula had probably smelled him--no surprise since he was pretty much covered in dried blood. He raised the Glock, ready to fire if the creature somehow managed to break in, but it moved off. The smell of the fresh blood in the education room had to be more enticing.

  Okay, Part A of the plan was working--the draculas were taking the bait. Part B depended on two factors: the hacks and the padre. Clay was pretty sure about the hacks. He'd rotated the firing pin in each round to line up with the detonator. Any impact would--should--set them off.

  Adam was a bigger unknown. Pulling that trigger would take a certain level of intestinal fortitude. He didn't know if a noncombatant and officer in the God Squad like the padre had it in him. Just have to wait and--

  The explosion shook the walls and floor, practically knocking Clay off his seat. Even through the locked door, the compression wave from the blast popped his ears.

  Sorry for doubting you, padre.

  Via con Dios.

  He waited half a minute, then unlocked the door and stepped out. He'd expected smoke but instead felt a cool, clean breeze. Outside air?

  He looked left and saw that windows on the far side of the building, opposite the explosion, had been blown out. He made his way through the rubble to the education room--or rather where it had been. The hallway wall and windows had been blown out. Everything in sight was coated with gore. The outer windows and wall were gone as well. He could look out at the night and see the flashing lights in the parking lot.

  The parking lot...that was where he wanted to be. With Shanna.

  He saw the TV copter idling in a clear corner of the lot. Great. The kids were safe.

  But he heard another copter--a much heavier engine noise than the KREZ bird--though he couldn't see it. Sounded like it was directly over the hospital. Another pickup? Jenny was the only one left up there.

  But would she go? Maybe, maybe not. Women were crazy sometimes.

  He headed for the stairs. He'd get up there and force her onto the bird--even if he had to sling her over his shoulder and carry her aboard. She felt she owed it to Randall to stay with him, but that was the last thing her ex would have wanted. Last thing Clay wanted too. She was a good nurse and good people. Not enough of those around.

  Randall...man, he'd misjudged him big time. But then, he'd known only the drunk Randall. The sober one was one helluva stand-up guy. Come to think of it, he'd underestimated the padre as well. Hazard of the job, he supposed. As a cop he saw too much of the worst side of people. After a while he couldn't help but start expecting it.

  In the stairwell, he made it up one flight before stumbling to an abrupt halt. He wasn't going any farther. The flights above were packed with draculas.

  Earlier, when he and Adam had made their way down, they'd had to climb over the pile of dead draculas Randall had sliced up. It had been a tight squeeze. Now the surviving draculas were feasting on their brothers, fighting each other for a place at the table. Probably what it had looked like on the way to the roof that last day at the US embassy in Saigon.

  He started back down, hoping Jenny got some sense into her head and boarded the chopper. She could return to Randall later, after the army or National Guard or whatever mopped up the surviving draculas.

  Jenny

  SHE stared up into the night sky at the helicopter. But it wasn't the one from the TV station. This one was dark, with guns mounted on the front and sides.

  Military.

  Jenny waved her hands over her head, but the aircraft gave no indication that it noticed her. It continued to hover, not making any attempt to land.

  Then the building shook and Jenny heard an explosion from the lower floors. One of Clay's toys? Or had the cavalry finally arrived?

  Shanna

  SHE was pacing back and forth by Clay's Suburban, praying for his safe return, when she noticed movement on the ground, not too far from her. She looked closer and saw one of the supposedly dead state troopers moving--one of the pair Clay hadn't shot.

  Oh, God. As it lifted its head and looked her way, glow from the army headlights glinted off rows of long sharp teeth.

  "Hey!" she called. "Hey, somebody! We've got trouble over here! Hey!"

  Nobody seemed to hear her. The noise from truck motors revving, soldiers shouting to each other, giving and taking orders, swallowed her cries.

  "Hey!" she called, raising her voice to its limit. "A little help over here."

  She backed up a few steps, readying to run, fearing it was coming for her, but it veered away, toward the empty darkness.

  Confused? The side of its skull looked bashed in. Too damaged to know what it was doing? Well, that was fine with Shanna...

  Except if it got away and bit someone, the plague would be loose and there'd be no stopping it.

  She screamed. "Will somebody please--oh, crap!" He was going to get away and no one was paying her a bit of attention.

  She glanced in the rear of Clay's Suburban and saw his super shotgun, his beloved AA-something. She didn't want to touch it...she remembered Marge back in the chapel, but somebody had to stop that thing.

  She grabbed the gun and went around the other side of the car in time to see the dracula passing. How hard could this be? She raised the shotgun, pointed it toward the thing, and, closing her eyes--she couldn't look--pulled the trigger.

  The gun boomed but had nowhere near the kick of that pistol Clay had handed her.

  She opened her eyes and saw the dracula on the pavement. She was about to congratulate herself when she realized it was still alive, if that was what you could call whatever it was, and trying to regain its feet. But it couldn't. Shanna had shredded its knees.

  "Lower your weapon!" shouted a voice behind her.

  She turned and found herself facing the muzzles of half a dozen guns of various shapes and sizes and a chorus telling her to drop it. She laid the shotgun gently on the pavement. After all, Clay loved that thing.

  "Now you listen!" she said.

  A soldier with three stripes on his arm--that meant sergeant, right?--who looked like he was in charge, got in her face. "What do you think you're doing, firing that here?"

  Shanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "One of them was getting away."

  A couple of the soldiers looked past her. She could tell by their expressions they'd never seen a dracula before.

  The sergeant said, "Put it down!"

  Half the soldiers turned their weapons toward the leaping monstrosity. In a rain of automatic weapon fire, they cut it to shreds.

  "Did you see that thing?"

  "What the fuck?"

  "Some kind of monster."

  Then four of the hospital's third-floor windows facing the parking lot blew out, belching flame and filling the air with bits of glass and charred flesh.

  Jenny

  JENNY continued to stare up at the military helicopter. Over the din of the rotors she yelled, "Down here!"

  It hovered directly overhead, and she watched one of the bay doors open. Then they began to lower a rescue basket down on a cable.

  No...not a rescue ba
sket.

  What the heck is that?

  Clay

  CLAY descended cautiously through the stairwell, Glock out and ready, but nothing leaped out of the shadows. The dracula population appeared to have been reduced to endangered-species level. No loss. This was one species that cried out for extinction.

  He was passing the pediatrics floor when he remembered Randall saying he'd had to leave Alice behind. Well, pediatrics was where he'd have left her.

  Clay stopped and considered the risk-benefit ratio. What if he allowed himself five minutes to search for Alice? Taurus Raging Bulls didn't come cheap, but even if someone simply gave him another, it wouldn't be Alice. He'd grown attached to Alice.

  He checked his watch and marked the time. Really. Five minutes--not a second more. What could it hurt?

  He eased through the door and made his way down the hall, thinking how anybody watching him would think he was out of his mind. Well, some people thought that anyway, especially when they learned he'd named his Taurus. But every so often you came across a weapon special enough for a name. Look at Davy Crockett. Hadn't he named his trusty flintlock Betsy? There you go. Nuff said.

  Near the nursing station Clay found a door that looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to it. Randall? Through another doorway he saw that clown dracula flat on its back, very dead. And there on the floor, amid fallen plaster and a string of guts that looked like they'd been tied into shapes...

  "Alice!"

  Shanna

  WHAT had happened? An explosion could mean only one person: Clay. But what could he have been carrying to blow out a wall like that? Better not to think about it. Who knew what Clay carried in his bag of tricks?

  She just hoped he hadn't gone up with it.

  The sergeant had told two soldiers to escort her--a euphemism--to the trailer at the rear of the lot. They pulled her inside and stuck her in what they'd called "the command center."

  It looked improvised in some ways--a featureless space with no decorations and half a dozen one-piece polymer chairs. But the small, fixed window that had to be at least an inch thick said otherwise. The best thing about that window was it faced the parking lot. Shanna had her nose pressed against it now, hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the room light, straining to see what was going on.

  The door opened behind her. She turned to see four disheveled-looking kids being herded into the room by the same two soldiers who had brought her. They moved away and then another soldier--with bars on his shoulders--strolled inside. He had gray hair and a barrel chest, and his expression was grim. He stared hard at Shanna.

  "Who are you?" he demanded.

  "Shanna Wiener. I'm an anthropologist."

  "Colonel Halford. My men just caught some sort of creature, Ms. Wiener. It attacked them, we believe, with intent to eat them."

  "Not eat them," Shanna corrected. "It wanted to suck their blood."

  "Do you know what it is?"

  "It's..." Shanna's voice went soft. "It's a dracula."

  "A dracula."

  She nodded.

  "As in a vampire? The kind you fight with crosses and garlic?"

  She shook her head. "Crosses don't work. I don't know about the garlic."

  Shanna expected disbelief, but Halford simply nodded.

  "Do you know how many there are?"

  "No. The infection spread quickly. There could be hundreds."

  He nodded again. Two soldiers came in and saluted. Col. Halford saluted back.

  "The autoclave is in place, sir."

  "Sound the sirens. Clear everyone to the perimeter. I want detonation in sixty seconds from the moment I stop talking. Dismissed."

  The men hurried off.

  "What's an autoclave?" Shanna asked. She didn't like the sound of it.

  "Same as in a hospital. Used for sterilizing medical equipment. Except this sterilizes a much larger area."

  "It's a bomb?"

  "It's a giant shaped charge. When detonated it will shoot a plasma jet down through the hospital roof with irresistible force at a speed of eight-thousand feet per second. The jet will penetrate each of the floors like an anti-tank missile melting through a steel armor plate. The air in the hospital will heat to ten thousand degrees, sterilizing the entire structure."

  Shanna shook her head. "My boyfriend...my fiance, is still in there."

  "I'm sorry, Ms. Wiener. I have my orders."

  No. This couldn't be happening. The military was here. They could help him.

  "Please. He's a good man. A cop. He saved a lot of people tonight."

  "I know. I just heard from four children who talked about a policeman with a big cool gun. But I also heard from Dr. Driscoll, my medical officer. She confirmed these creatures are contagious. We simply can't risk any of them getting away. They've managed to kill six of my men in less than ten minutes, Ms. Wiener. Good men, well trained. Durango has a population of fourteen thousand, and it's only ten miles away. If one of those things manages to get there, it will be a slaughter."

  Shanna didn't think, she acted, running for the door, leaping out into the night, sprinting for the hospital as fast as she could.

  She had to get Clay out of there. Had to--

  Two men tackled her.

  A few seconds later she was in handcuffs, being dragged away, screaming at the top of her lungs, "Clay! CLAAAAAY!"

  Jenny

  BY the time she realized that the object they had lowered onto the roof was a bomb--a huge, army-green charge--Jenny had just enough time for a belly laugh. She thought of Randall...dear, sweet, Randall. He would have appreciated the humor of surviving a dracula outbreak only to be killed by the good guys.

  It was damn ironical.

  Clay

  HE snatched up the Taurus and began wiping her off. Poor Alice was a mess--blood, plaster dust, and who knew what else.

  He hugged her to his chest. "Hey, baby. Gonna take you home and get you cleaned up and oiled and good as--"

  Then he heard screaming. He'd heard a lot of screaming that day, but this seemed to be coming from outside. And rather than the incoherent, senseless terror he'd gotten used to, this sounded a lot like his name.

  He hurried to the nearby window, broken out by Adam's farewell blast directly above, and stared out over the parking lot.

  One floor down and maybe a hundred yards away...that looked like Shanna, being dragged away by some soldiers. She continued to cry out to him.

  Why was she so panicked? She was safe down there.

  Then he grinned. Probably worried sick about him. Or missing him something fierce.

  "Don't worry, babe. I'll be right--"

  He heard a boom from above and then a blast of heat like a solar flare seared through the hospital, hurling his burning body through the window.

  Shanna

  SHANNA was still screaming when the roof of the hospital exploded in an incandescent flare. The boom and shockwave stopped her in her tracks and she watched in horror as the windows and walls of the fourth floor vomited flame and debris, followed almost immediately by the third and second and first. Every entrance, every exit blew its doors and shot flames like giant blowtorches.

  And then the floors began to collapse--first the roof onto the fourth, then the fourth onto the third, pancaking all the way down to ground level, leaving only a flame-riddled cloud of smoke and dust and debris on the far side of the parking lot.

  A cheer went up from the watching soldiers and she wanted to kill them. Instead, she began to cry. Huge, wracking sobs shook her to her toes.

  Clay... she felt the ring box in her pocket pressing against her thigh. A good man, a hero, and no one would know. No, wait. Those kids would know. They'd remember the guy with the big cool gun. Clay would love to be remembered that way.

  Colonel Halford walked over, told his men to release her.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "You can take that sorry and shove it up your ass."

  She stormed away, and no one bother
ed to stop her. The cool night was now hot as the summer in Nevada, and the burning hospital bright enough to see the damage that had been done to it. The autoclave had performed as advertised. The building wasn't just sterilized. It was annihilated. Nothing could have survived that.

  Choking back a sob, Shanna headed toward the TV crew. They were interviewing a man. A doctor. Incredibly, his scrubs were pristine, not a mark on them. He held a sleeping baby close to his chest, while a good-looking brunette asked him how he had managed to save the infant.