Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(31)
A high-?pitched scream tore through her consciousness and a once-?human body slammed into her, knocking her down. She could only register that its breath was horrible as he pushed her down to the carpet. She saw a long weapon glint as it was raised high—a meat fork, it looked like, a foot long and with four wicked barbed tines—and then it was all she could do to throw her head to one side as the fork came down right where her left eye had been. The half-?dead on top of her screamed again and she saw the tattered skin of its face jiggle, felt spittle fleck her cheeks and upper lip. It tried raising its fork for another attack but couldn’t. The tines had gotten stuck in the wooden floor. Caxton had been trained in some very basic martial arts, so she knew what to do next. She got one knee between her attacker’s legs and pushed up with all her strength. Whether half-?deads had sensitive testicles or not was a moot point; the maneuver was intended to roll the thing off of her body, and it worked. She could have followed up by rolling on top of it and pinning its arms down, but she didn’t bother taking the move that far. Instead she yanked her Beretta out of its holster and shoved the barrel up under the half-?dead’s chin. Its eyes went wide just before she squeezed the trigger, but afterward what was left of its face went slack.
She took a second to study the dead thing, trying to figure out who it had been and what it was doing in the house. One look at its clothes told her the whole story.
It was dressed in the gray shirt and navy blue pants of a Pennsylvania state trooper. One of her own. Jameson must have been waiting in the house when the troopers broke in. He would have made short work of them. Though she had tried to warn them what dangers awaited inside, she had known when she sent the troopers in that they weren’t prepared or trained in how to fight a bloodthirsty monster. Once he killed them they had become his to play with, and he must have raised them from the dead even before Caxton arrived on the scene. That was why there had been no bodies in the cars out front—because the bodies had already been inside the house.
There could be as many as six more half-?deads inside the house, then. She didn’t have time to feel guilty. As fast as she could, she rolled over and jumped to her feet. She peered through the door her attacker had come through and saw the room beyond, a kind of butler’s pantry lined with cupboards. The room also contained a simple table, a few chairs, and at the far end a very narrow staircase leading down. She figured it had to go down to the kitchen. She could already hear more half-?deads clattering up those steps.
She thought fast. A brass key stood in the keyhole on the inside of the door. She yanked it out, slammed the door shut, and locked it from the outside. When the mechanism clicked she hit the key with the butt of her weapon, breaking it off inside the lock.
Her next move was easy to figure out. There was no more point in subterfuge. “Glauer!” she shouted, as loud as she could, just in case he hadn’t heard the gunshot. “Glauer! Now!”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 21.
The half-?deads inside the butler’s pantry hammered on the door and it shook wildly in its frame. It was constructed of thick oak, though, and Caxton thought it would hold awhile. She rushed to the head of the stairs, still shouting for Glauer. She hoped he could hear her, through the walls of the house. If he couldn’t she was in real trouble. She could hear more half-?deads moving around on the ground floor, but she couldn’t see anything. Sweeping her Mag-?Lite around the base of the steps revealed nothing but faded carpet and motes of dust that twirled in the light’s beam. She was going to have to run down there and hope for the best. She had her Beretta, and plenty of ammunition, but she knew better than to think she could shoot accurately in the dark house. Holding her light high and her handgun low, she started down the stairs. She took them carefully, one at a time. She was halfway down when a knife sailed past her cheek to clatter against the steps behind her. It passed so close to her skin that she could see the brass rivets in its wooden handle and the serrations on the blade—close enough that it made her weave over to one side and lose her balance. She stumbled down three stairs, her left hand lashing out for the banister. She caught it, but in the process her flashlight tumbled free and bounced down the steps. Its jumping, falling light caught the torn face of a half-?dead for just a moment, showing the gray, twitching muscles beneath the raveled skin. The creature was smiling broadly—but then the light bounced away again and rolled to the bottom of the stairs, where a pale hand grabbed it up and switched it off.
Caxton crouched low in case another knife came flying up at her and fired two rounds wildly down at the monsters who lay in wait for her. One of them screamed, a high-?pitched wail that made her nerves twist, a sound like a cat being thrown into an ice-?cold bathtub. It wasn’t a mortal scream, though. She must have just winged her target.
The flare of the gunshots was enough to dazzle her eyes and she was blind. Things had gone from bad to worse, and then they grew worse still. From above she heard the locked door splinter and crack and finally burst out of its frame. Hurried footsteps came rushing down the gallery toward her. Unable to see, surrounded on every side, she did the only thing she could think of. Caxton’s hand was still on the banister. She holstered her pistol, grabbed the banister with her other hand, and then vaulted over the side of the staircase into empty, lightless space.
Almost instantly her feet struck the top of the round séance table. Unable to see where she was going to land, she had braced herself to drop all the way to the carpet, maybe eight feet down. She hadn’t been prepared for the table to be in the way, and her feet went out from under her. Painfully she struck the table with her side and then half rolled, half dropped to the carpeted floor.