Dave Zeltserman - Blood Crimes Book One

He had been right about the building being a converted hotel, and also about it’s location-it turned out to be in the heart of Union Square. After a month of being cooped up inside of this glorified tomb, Serena took him clubbing with her and her posse. By this point he had become more than just her sex toy. While she was still engaging in orgies with her posse, she was spending her nights alone with Jim, confiding secrets, and at times even appearing vulnerable. He knew this special treatment didn’t play well with the other members of her inner circle, especially Zach, and he was careful when he was alone with them. When they went out clubbing, Serena spent less time eyeing other men, and mostly focused on Jim, whispering in his ear and rubbing her body against his. His own feelings towards her were a mix of hate and lust. As much as he was disgusted by her, she could make him hard simply by looking at him. Sex with her was always a thrill ride, and he kept his true feelings about her hidden.

After five months he was satisfied with the intelligence he collected, and when he had his next opportunity to escape, he took it. Like every night when they went out clubbing, Serena and her posse doped themselves up first with heroin, and that night they snorted extra lines and were more lethargic than usual. At the club, Zach was brooding over some imagined slight, which attracted Serena’s attention enough for Jim to slip away. He left through a back door and kept running until he was out of Manhattan and crossing over the Queensboro bridge into Long Island City. The first night he spent in a condemned tenement building. He could hear the rats squealing as they fled. After that night he found a studio apartment off of Queens Boulevard to rent. The place was a dump, but it didn’t matter. The cockroaches and other pests emptied out of it within seconds of him showing up. Besides, he didn’t expect to be there long.

During his time in the vampire hotel, or tomb, as he had come to think of the place, he had worked out some initial plans of how he was going to free the “cattle” being held in the basement, and destroy Serena, Metcalf, and the other vampires living there. He knew that while it was difficult to kill an infected person, it was possible. With enough explosive force he would be able to blow off their limbs, and then cut off their heads as they lay helpless. The plan he worked out was basically a suicide mission, which was okay with him as long as it left the other vampires dead. Hell, he always thought he left Iraq with one last mission left in him. The only piece of intel that he was missing that bothered him was the source of the infection. He never was able to identify whether the virus started with Serena, Metcalf, or a third party, and he would’ve liked to have known that when he was done the virus had been fully eradicated. But he was going to have to leave this one loose end.

He had taken twenty grand from Serena the night he went on the run. As far as Serena was concerned money was of no object and that twenty grand was nothing but loose change to her. One of the residents of the tomb was a billionaire founder of a dot-com company whom she had infected so she could make him transfer all of his assets to her. Now that he was in Queens, Jim was using most of the twenty grand to purchase explosives, but it didn’t go nearly as far as he had hoped. He needed more money to carry out his plan, and he started searching out drug dealers to rob. They were easy. He didn’t kill them, but he roughed them up and took their money.

He had blueprints for the hotel, and was close to having what he needed when one night while wiring up bombs, the door to his studio apartment was kicked in and standing outside were two vampires. They were thicker and darker than the other vampires he had seen, but he knew from the shape of their heads that they were infected. He didn’t recognize them, but he didn’t know all of the residents of the tomb. It was also possible Serena infected them to send after him-she had no qualms about infecting people to get what she needed. Jim would later learn from the newspapers that that was what happened-that these two were Mafia hit men who were missing for ten days before showing up at his studio apartment. They were both carrying big-ass pistols that Jim would later learn from the papers were Magnum. 357s. Without a word they lifted their guns and started firing at him, hitting him pointblank in the chest with bullets that he’d also later learn from the papers were armor piercing. The force of the bullets blew him out of his seat and against the wall. One of the bullets must have ricocheted off his chest and hit a stick of dynamite. The room exploded into flames and he was blown through the wall and sent into the street. More explosions followed. A searing heat rolled over him. As he lay on his back he saw the building collapse onto itself.

His whole body ached, but he was still in one piece. People started to pour out of the buildings nearby. Jim used the ensuing panic to search through the rubble. He found one of hit men with his legs blown off at the knees. The vampire had been blinded by the smoke and dust, and was trying to stagger away on his stumps. Jim used a piece of metal as a makeshift sword. The first swing went a few inches into the vampire’s neck. It took a half dozen more swings before he had the head mostly cut off. Before he could pull his makeshift sword loose, he was tackled from behind and found himself rolling among the rubble with the other hit man.

“I got nothin’ against you, buddy,” the vampire grunted as it struggled to point the barrel of gun at Jim’s mouth. “I’m just doing a job, so do me a favor and fucking die already.”

He had pressed the barrel against Jim’s neck, but either he was out of bullets or the gun had jammed because nothing happened when he pulled the trigger. He started to give the gun a pissed off look, but before he could do much else, Jim had flipped him over. While they had been rolling around Jim found one of his hand grenades. He pinched the hit man’s nostrils shut. When the vampire opened his mouth to breath, Jim shoved the grenade in, pulled the pin, counted, then rolled off.

The blast knocked him over. It also took off enough of the vampire’s head to kill it. Sirens were approaching. Jim got up and ran before anyone could stop him. Hours later he was in Newark, and a few days later he found Carol. After that his plans changed.

Carol had the TV set on. The motor lodge offered fourteen cable channels, along with pay per view porn. She couldn’t find MTV, and after flipping through the channels several times and finding nothing of interest, she left it on a religious program. It didn’t matter what was on, she just wanted the background noise, anything to block out the squealing of bedsprings from the neighboring room.

After her first few weeks together with Jim, he bought her a lady’s handgun, a Smith amp; Wesson. 38 caliber revolver. It was funny that it was considered a lady’s handgun since it still had enough firepower to stop a two hundred and fifty pound NFL linebacker in his tracks. It wasn’t pink, and it didn’t have little hearts decorating it, but Carol figured it was because the gun could fit in her purse and only weighed twenty ounces. Whenever she helped Jim lure a predator to feed on, he always insisted that she bring her gun along in case he lost track of her. She now had the gun laying on the bed and stared transfixed at it for what seemed like an eternity, all the while an evangelical preacher from the TV rambled on about how Jesus suffered each day for their sins and if the good people listening could only dig deep into their hearts, and even deeper into their wallets, the lord’s pain could be eased. A hardness froze Carol’s face. Earlier she had cracked open the cylinder and dumped the bullets onto the bed sheet.