Charming (40 page)

He was a brown-haired lanky son of a bitch in a dark T-shirt and none of that mattered because the rifle he was aiming was obscuring part of his face, and I needed a good head shot. I was upside down and aiming one-handed while my feet braced to keep me from swaying, but I saw his rifle rise a few centimeters and to hell with it, I began firing.

One of my shots must have panicked him because he tried to move backward by pushing himself off the ground using his Winchester as a lever. He would have been better off letting go of the rifle and using his hands and elbows to shove himself backward flat on the ground. My next shot clipped him on the side of his skull but the bullet either grazed him or bounced off or lodged in bone or missed his brain. The shot after that hit the lower half of his face as he continued to push himself up. Another shot took him in the forehead, and he twitched and dropped back down. The two shots after that missed entirely because I was still raising my gun trying to anticipate the rising motion he was no longer completing.

“Cas!” I shouted, and covered the sloping tunnel while Sig dropped down, maneuvering herself onto the solid ground around the stake pit. Then she picked her shield and spear up off the ground and advanced to the tunnel entrance, where she covered me while I lowered myself and worked free of my harness. A few feet above the ground I grabbed hold of the nylon cord and pulled myself upward to create a little slack, then flipped to my feet with smooth ninja-like efficiency.

Or maybe I hit the ground between the pit and the tunnel on my shoulder because my foot caught in the cord when I tried to roll, and then I spent a few seconds flopping around like a fish who’d somehow managed to get a hook caught in its spine.

I forget which.

Removing a can of Silly String from my canvas belt, I started up the slope. I sprayed strands of plastic left and right and high and low, but I didn’t find any trip wires or see any obvious irregularities in ground surface. The slope was actually helpful because it made it easier to keep my nose close to the ground. At one point I smelled wood and dead skin cells in a much more intense concentration than anywhere else, and I veered to the left, spraying a big circle around the area.

When I made it to where the vampire sentry was lying prone, his body was still twitching as his brain tried to reestablish neural connections. I peeked over the edge and got a massive whiff of ammonia.

I pulled the sentry’s body down onto the slope with me, then checked him for ammunition. There were half a dozen old-fashioned silvertip bullets in his jeans pockets.
Silver
just refers to the color of the bullet tips, by the way—the nose points are actually aluminum. I rolled the vampire’s body down toward Sig but kept the rifle, a .338 Winchester. While I was reloading the Winchester I heard heavy wet rending impact sounds behind me as Sig decapitated the vampire by slamming the edge of her shield down on his neck. She was strong and the shield was heavy and roughly triangular, but the narrow base didn’t have a sharp edge, so she had to repeat the motion.

Still lying flat, I inched up and peered over the edge of the slope again, scoping out the next tunnel connection while holding the Winchester. This tunnel seemed to be level and headed straight west. At least that was consistent with the diagram Dvornik had drawn us. The tunnel traveled something like forty yards before bending south. About halfway down that length, I noticed something odd. The center of the tunnel had been reinforced with a series of wooden beams in much greater concentration than anywhere else I had seen yet. Had
that section of tunnel collapsed a few times while they were digging?

In the middle of that area was something that looked like an unusually large speed bump made of mud. According to Dvornik there was supposed to be a sentry with a rifle using that barrier as a shield to hide behind, but maybe that was the vampire Sig had just ended. Maybe he’d heard the commotion and left his post.

I couldn’t hear anyone else within twenty yards, though I did hear sounds of movement echoing from farther down the tunnel, around its next bend. Vampires are capable of complete stillness, though, and the wooden beams around the small mound bothered me. Could someone be flat against the wall behind them? Were the beams there because there was some kind of trap that affected the stability of the tunnel?

My job at this point was to give the rest of the team time to establish a… well… not a beachhead… a tunnelhead, I suppose. Choo needed to get our heavy weapons down here, and Molly needed to sanctify our perimeter.

I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t repulsing any more attacks. Dvornik had said that the vampires didn’t have an escape tunnel finished, so what the hell were they doing? Why was I hearing clinking sounds from farther down the tunnel system, like chains? Anne Marie had built this place to hold human prisoners—were the vampires making a wall of human shields to rush down the tunnel? Or were the chains for us?

“What the hell is that smell?” Sig asked as she moved up the slope beside me. Bringing herself up to her knees, she raised the shield over her head and straightened briefly before hammering the shield’s bottom into the ground at the edge of the slope. Once the shield was firmly anchored, she slid her arm from the metal grip and placed herself behind it.

“It’s cat urine,” I said grimly. Cat urine is often used as a masking scent. It not only has a powerful stink that covers other smells but also an ammonia base that breaks down the molecules of the other smells and gradually destroys them. “They were prepared for someone with a sensitive nose.”

“They did see you in the woods,” Sig said pensively.

“Yeah,” I agreed without really agreeing. Shouldering the Winchester, I sighted on the mound and took a shot at the top of it. Mud and a spray of gravel from newly busted rock flew outward from it, leaving a small hole behind. The hole should have been bigger. That mound was concrete covered with mud.

“What are you doing?” Sig asked. “We could use that mound for cover later.”

“If it’s got explosives in it, I’d rather find out from here,” I said tautly, adjusting my aim slightly. It was the first time I’d ever used a .338 Winchester. Even though I’m stronger than a normal human, the rifle still had a kick. My ears were ringing from the sound of the report within the tunnel too.

“Explosives?” Andro crawled up on Sig’s other side and began to set his rifle up on the right side of her shield.

“See how many of those beams there are?” I asked, and fired again. I hit the section of mound right next to my earlier shot, and this time, after the initial burst, a larger portion of the mound collapsed into the gap I’d already created. “Why so many there and nowhere else? And what are they trying to keep me from smelling? We already know there are vampires.”

I loaded two more shells into the Winchester.

“St—my uncle saw a marksman hiding behind that thing two days ago,” Andro argued. “They wouldn’t use packed explosives as cover! Especially not underground.”

“You’re probably right,” I said and fired another round dead into the mound’s center. There was a loud crack and a shower
of dried mud and a cloud of dust. Maybe there was a land mine in the area between me and the mound instead of inside it, and the mound was there to protect a sentry lying behind it.

When there was no explosion, I handed the rifle to Sig. “Cover me.”

“That’s not.…” she started to say.

“That’s my job,” Andro interjected. He was acting angry, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

“I like to have backups for my backups,” I told him. “It’s a character flaw.”

I removed my can of Silly String and sprayed it into the air. It didn’t hit any trip wires. “I want to get a closer whiff.”

“You need to follow your orders.” Now Andro’s anger seemed real.

Instead, I took a steam canister off Andro’s belt and threw it ten feet down the tunnel without pulling the tab. After an initial startled movement, he didn’t protest.

“This tunnel is a turkey shoot,” I said. “If this is what it looks like, you two can hold this area without me. And if this isn’t what it looks like, we need to find out right now.”

I started crawling down the tunnel, Glock in one hand, Silly String in the other, keeping my nose close to the ground and my eyes on the mound while I pulled myself on my elbows. Nobody tried to talk me out of it or grabbed my ankle. The Silly String only had a range of about ten feet, so I had to stop, drop the can, and toss the unused steam canister ahead of me again. If I got in trouble I planned to shoot it to provide cover.

The movement I’d been hearing down the tunnel, around the bend at the end, gradually… stopped. No chains. I crawled another ten feet, occasionally lifting my head up so that I could see above the mound ahead of me. It was while doing this that
I caught my first whiff of something besides cat urine, and it momentarily froze me. It was just the faintest lingering trace of a smell, almost the ghost of a smell really, but it was a very distinctive odor.

I smelled silver azide. If there had been silver azide in the mound, I would have caused it to blow up when I shot it, but I must have stirred things up enough to kick up some lingering scent molecules and send them airborne.

Silver azide is basically a solid, explosive form of silver nitrate. It is extremely volatile and can be set off by impact or ultraviolet rays. A few chemical agents can make it into a more stable paste, a few packaging tricks can make handling it safer, but the modern industrialized world has never bothered to really explore them.

The problem with killing werewolves with conventional explosives is that you have to use a lot of them to really be certain. With silver azide you don’t have to commit overkill, because if a were-being is in close proximity, any damage caused by the initial blast won’t heal. Silver azide would be the weapon I would use if I wanted to kill a were-being with a small explosion that wouldn’t bring a tunnel down.

But you can’t learn to use silver azide off the Internet.

There was no way silver azide had been weaponized down here without instruction from a monster hunter. A knight… or a kresnik.

I dropped the Silly String and unobtrusively pulled the tab on the steam canister. Acting like I was about to throw it forward, I waited until the steam began to emerge and threw the canister backward instead, rolling to the side and to my feet as I did so. It was the only protection from Andro’s .50 caliber that I was going to get, but his rifle didn’t fire.

Then I was running through the emerging steam cloud and back toward the ridge, bringing my Glock up in case Andro was aiming his rifle at me. There was an impossibly loud noise. My eardrums ruptured. My skin was blown off my back.

That’s all. I don’t even remember those last things, really. It’s just the impression I get when I close my eyes and try to remember, and it makes me wince.

33

Y
ou know, you kind of give me mixed signals.”

“I know. I just don’t like the idea of going down that hole tomorrow with this thing hanging over you and me like…”

“Like an open airplane storage locker?”

I tried to smile and my lips felt like they were stuck together. I pulled on them with my jaw muscles and it made my face hurt, which made my head hurt, which made my neck hurt, which made pain trail all the way down my spine. It was like I was caught in a sadistic children’s song.

“I was trying to think of the name of that sword that used to hang over a king’s head. Was it the sword of Pericles?… Come on, I know you know it. I saw all those books when I was in your house the other day.”

Was I in a hospital? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a hospital. My nose was full of sharp acidic and antiseptic smells. Clay, laminate, and chemicals, lots of chemicals.

“It was the sword of Damocles.”

“Right, Anyway, I like the ‘open airplane storage compartment’ thing better. It means there’s a journey with lots of baggage.”

“And things being balanced precariously.”

My eyelids felt heavy. They wanted to stay closed, and my mouth was dry. That was me and Sig talking, but I wasn’t talking. We’d already had this conversation.